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THE 



GADARENE 



OB, 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 



By J. O. BAKKETT and J. M. PEEBLES. 



"Try the Spirits whether they are of God; for many false prophets have 
gone out into the world."— Apostle John. 



BOSTON: 

COLBY AND RICH, 

BANNER OP LIGHT OFFICE, 
9 Montgomery Place. 

1874. 






Entered according to Act oi Congress, in the year 1874, 

By BARRETT, PEEBLES, COLBY & RICH, 

In the ortice or tne .Librarian oi Congress, at wasnington. 



DEDICATED 

TO 

THE PURE IN HEART. 



Deab Keader: 

We have only briefly to say: That we write this 
book from a sense of solemn duty, indifferent alike to enco- 
mium and criticism. It is fact we are after ; and the truth we 
mean to speak at any hazard. The world is full of " seducing 
spirits and doctrines of devils speaking lies in hypocrisy." 
Our mission is to expose them ; explain the canses and suggest 

the remedies. 

AUTHORS. 



INDEX 

OF CHAPTEES AND SUBDIVISIONS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Moral Good and Evil 13-28 

Ancient Morals 17-20 

Are there Evil Spirits? : 20-26 

Chrysalis of the Spirit 26-28 

CHAPTER II. 

Demons and Gods 29-35 

New Testament Demoniacs 34-35 

Testimony of the Doctors 32-34 

CHAPTER III. 

Mundane and Celestial Spheres 36-61 

A Universal Elastic Medium 37-38 

Contageous Madness 47-48 

Color of Spheres 60-61 

Healing Spheres 55-58 

Human Spheres 40-42 

Ignorant Injuries 54 

Magnetic Currents of Spheres 42-43 

Magnetic Penetrability 43-44 

Magnetic Defilement 50-51 

Odor of Spheres 60 

Power of Magnetic Spheres 51-54 

(5) 



6 INDEX. 

Revivals - 54-55 

Sound of Spheres 58-60 

Spheres of Sects - - 44-45 

Spheres of Things - 38-40 

The Chinese Rehellion 45^6 

Vaccination 48-50 



CHAPTER IV. 

Obsessions 62-101 

A Remarkable Case.. .84-90 

Case of a Universalist Minister 90-92 

Case of Religious Obsession 70-71 

Development and Degeneration. .94-96 

Divination 92-94 

Hellish Orgies 96-101 

How Spirits tormented Swedenborg 67-70 

Jewish Obsessions 65-66 

Murderous Spirits ..80-82 

New Zealand Maoris ..82-84 

The Morzine Obsessions 71 

Unhappy Spirits 71-80 



CHAPTER V. 

"Witchcraft and Hallucination 102-109 

Biblical Witchcraft ...103-104 

Ecclesiastic Persecutions _ . 104-106 

Hallucination 108-109 

Malay Witches ...106-107 

The African Camma 103 



CHAPTER VI. 

Effects of Association 110-121 

A Licentious Medium 112-116 

The Gambler's Den 116-121 



INDEX. 7 

CHAPTER VII. 

Psychology op Sentiment and Habit 123-140 

Conceptive Immortality 136-137 

Confounding of Virtue and Vice -.130-133 

Correlation of Physical and Spiritual Forces 138-140 

Social Disparities 137-138 

The Evangelical Alliance .128-130 

What shall we do to be Saved? 133-136 



CHAPTER VIII. 

"Set Thine House in Order," 141-169 

An Orthodox Spirit 158-162 

Boy Reclaimed from an Evil Spirit ...142-144 

Curanta Similibus — Insanities 144-149 

Christian Exorcism 149-150 

Curing by Music 168-169 

Effects of Bigotry 157-158 

Haunted Houses 151-153 

Intemperate Spirits .162-166 

Injury of Sudden Expulsions ...167-168 

Superstitious Methods 150-151 

Transfigurations 153-157 



CHAPTER IX. 

MEDruMSHip— Orderly and Disorderly 170-185 

A Plea for the Mediums 180-182 

Abuses of Mediumship 175-176 

Dark Circles 178-180 

Disorderly Circles 177-178 

Multiform Control 172-174 

Natural and Acquired Mediumship 174-175 

Orderly Circles. ...176-177 

Unmediated Spirituality 182-185 



8 INDEX. 

CHAPTER X. 

Shall we Worship Spirits? 186-199 

Blending Deific Ideas 195-197 

Hebrew Monotheism 194-195 

Religious Mistake 197-199 

The Transcendent Law 188-193 



CHAPTER XI. 

Hope for the Bewildered 200-220 

A Just Charity 215 

Regeneration in the Spirit Life 216-219 

Spiritual Vestures 219-220 

Spirits may be better than they seem 202-211 

Spirits Obsessed by their Media 211-213 

The Poor Indian's Hope 201-202 

The Shakers 213-214 



CHAPTER XII. 
Registry of Life 221-232 



ANALYTICAL INDEX. 



Abuses of Spiritualism 97 

Abortions .135 

Allan Kardec 154 

Alger, Rev.W.R.,on Insanity 145 

Anna Blackwell 156 

Ancient Morals 17 

Apollinaris 149 

Assyrian Exorcism 141 

Aztecs 189 

Babbage 229 

Beecher, H. W., on Spirits. 78 

Beecher, Rev. Chas 37 

Beecher, Dr. Edward 177 

Bigotry, effects of 157 

Blending Deific Ideas 195 

Blood Corpuscles 95 

Body Chrysalis of Spirit... 26 
Boy reclaimed from Evil 

Spirits 142 

Brittan's Quart. Journal 203 

Brahminic Exorcism 166 

Brown, Sir Thomas 158 

Buddha Morality 133 

Buddhistic Commandments, 19 

Burges 30 

Buchanan, Prof. J. R 41 



Catholic Priests and Judge 

Edmonds 166 

Case of Universalist Minister 90 

Cerebral Ganglia 40 

Chinese Rebellion 45 

Christian Exorcism 149 

Civilizations, Causes of 39 

Clarke, Prof. J. F 150 

Colby, Luther. 168 

Color of Spheres 60 

Conant, Mrs. J. H ..154 

Conceptive Immortality 136 

Confounding Virtue and 

Vice.. 130 

Conventional Restraints 208 

Correlation of Force 138 

Correspondences 27 

Cumsean Sybils 110 

Curanta Similibus .144 

Darwin and Laycock 94 

Dark Circles 178 

Death by Psychic Force... 55 

Demons and Gods 29 

Demoniacs of New Testa- 
ment 34 

Delaarge's Living Fire 42 

Depleted Spirits 206 

(9) 



10 



ANALYTICAL INDEX. 



Depraved Ideas 123 

Development and Degener- 
ation 94 

Diakka 24 

Diabolos and Satan 62 

Ditson, G. L 141 

Disorderly Spirits.. 177 

Divination 92 

Doten, Lizzie 217 

Dreams 108 

Duel a l'outrance 53 

Ecclesiastic Persecution... 104 

Effects of Association 110 

Electricity— Reforms 146 

Enlightened Media 112 

Ether of the Universe 37 

Essaeans ..146 

Evans, F. W 214 

Evangelical Alliance .128 

Evil Spirits 20 

Evolution of Matter 36 

Evil Spirits— Belief in 22 

Exorcism .141 

Faith Principle 181 

Fanny Green McDougal...203 

Fetish Tribes ..103 

Ferrier, Prof.. 146 

Filthy Obsessions 153 

Foeticide 134 

French Communes 47 

Gambler's Den 116 

Gregory, Sir Wm 43 

Hallucinations 108 



Hardinge, Emma 71 

Haunted Houses 151 

Healing Spheres 55 

Hebrew Obsessions 66 

Hellish Orgies 96 

Hesiod 30 

Hope for the Bewildered... 200 

How to form Circles 176 

How to be Saved 133 

Howitt, William 72 

Ignorant Inj ur ies 54 

Indians — Cause of Decay. _ 53 

Infant Damnation 124 

Indian's Hope 201 

Injury of Sudden Expulsion 167 
Insanity — Egyptian Cure ..148 
Intemperate Spirits 162 

Jamblichus 63 

Jesus casting out Spirits. ..142 

Jean Reynaud 221 

Jewish Obsessions 65 

Jung Stilling 174 

Just Charity 215 

Justin Martyr 149 

Kabala 32 

Last Hours of Life .232 

Lecky .105 

Libations to Spirits 103 

Licentious Medium 112 

Longfellow on Spirits 151 

Longfellow, Rev. Samuel ..189 

Love all-saving 219 

Luther's Devils 110 



ANALYTICAL INDEX. 



11 



Luther's Table Talk 106 

Lying Spirits -.100 

Magnectic " Tractors," 152 

Magnetic Defilement 40 

Magnetic Penetrability 53 

Magnetic Poison 58 

Magic Stones, etc 39 

Maylay Witches 107 

Masterion. 24 

Mediumship 170 

Mediumship acquired 174 

Mediumship abused ..175 

Menu, Laws of 188 

Milton on Lust 67 

Miser in Spirit Life 23 

Modern References 66 

Moral Sensitiveness . 17 

Morzine Obsessions 71 

Multiform Control 172 

Murderous Spirits 80 

Necromancy, etc 62 

Nervaura — Dr. Randolph . . 93 

Nero — Responsible 16 

New England Witchcraft. .106 
New Zealand Maoris 82 

Obsessions 62 

Obsession in California 84 

Obsession by Orthodox 

Priest... 158 

Occult Science 38 

Old and New Religion 196 

Odor of Spheres. 60 

Orthodox Obsession 73 

Owen, Robert Dale 216 



Pharisaical Spiritualism... 200 

Physical Manifestations 155 

Plea for Mediums 180 

Plato's Testimony 31 

Polytheism & Monotheism. 188 

Priestly Superstitions 207 

Progress of Heavens 16 

Progress of Primaries 55 

Promiscuity 97 

Power of Psychic Force... 51 

Procl us and Porphyry 64 

Psychic Influence .222 

Psychology of Habit 122 

Qualification for Medium- 
ship 174 

Ratios of Magnetic Life 204 

Reichenbach 38 

Regeneration in Spirit Life. 216 

Rebold 38 

Religious Obsession 70 

Registry of Life ..221 

Renan's Life of Jesus 65 

Robes of Spirits 61 

Ruskins on Rainbows 200 

Saving Spirits 220 

Sargent, Epes ..^ 112 

Self Deception 109 

Sexual Obsessions 96 

Sexual Insanity 99 

Set thine House in Order ..141 

Severance, Dr. J. H ...159 

Shall we Worship Spirits? .186 

Shakers 213 

Skin Grafting, etc 42 



12 



ANALYTICAL INDEX. 



Soldiers 95 

Song of Life 199 

Smell of Spirits 60 

Social Disparities .137 

Sound of Spheres _ 58 

Spirit Building 139 

Spirits Obsessed 211 

Spirits better than they seeni202 
Spiritual drunkard cured.. 210 
" Spiritual Philosophy vs. 

Diabolism,". 22 

Spirit Battery of Brain 42 

Sphere of Things. 38 

Spiritual Adultery 98 

Spirit Materialization. 154 

Spirit Flowers 156 

Spiritual Vestures 220 

Stars— Registry on 222 

Superstitious Exorcism 150 

Swedenborg's Obsessions ..68 

Tappan, Cora L. V 57 

Testimony of Spiritualists. 77 

Temple of Diana 227 

Theology Debasing 123 



Theism ...189 

Tilton, Theodore 196 

Tiffany, Joel 132 

Trail, Dr. R. T 133 

Transcendent Law .188 

Transfigurations 153 

Trying Spirits 204 

Two Recording Angels 230 

Universalists — Evil Spirits. 32 
Unhappy Spirits 71 

Unmediated Spirituality... 182 

Vedas 63 

Weise, Dr. John A 145 

"Wesley, John 67 

Whipple, Edward .208 

"Witchcraft 102 

"Wolfe, Dr. N. B .179 

"Worship of Spirits 198 

Zoroaster's Morality 133 

Zoroastrian Belief 191 



THE GADAKENE. 



CHAPTER I 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 



The common consciousness of the race admits a 
standard of moral rectitude. This is the transcendent 
law of humanity. Protagoras was a cunning sophist; 
Socrates, a philosopher. " Man is the measure of all 
things," said Protagoras; "and, as men differ, there 
can be no absolute truth." " Man is the measure of 
all things," replied Socrates; " but descend deeper into 
his personality, and you will find that underneath all 
varieties there is a ground of steady truth. Men differ, 
but men also agree: they differ as to what is fleeting; 
they agree as to what is eternal. Difference is the 
region of opinion; Agreement is the region of Truth: 
let us endeavor to penetrate that region." 

Pseudo-philosophers tell us there is no moral evil 
in the universe — only a graded good. Is a lie a lower 
degree of truth? hate a lower degree of love? rape a 
(13) 



14 THE GADARENE. 

lower degree of chastity? To enunciate is to reveal 
the hideousness of such reasoning. 

The objection is mooted, that what we regard as good 
to-day may be our evil to-morrow. Admitted on the 
score of progress. But is moral distinction thus 
annulled? Do we not again have our contrasts — what 
we like and dislike — what to us is good and what evil? 
A simple fact in science — often used in argument 
against the existence of evil — will cover the whole 
ground in plain sight: There is heat in cold. True, 
but does this destroy our mental consciousness of the 
distinction between heat and cold? Do not our sensa- 
tions test them ? Divide and subdivide infmitesimally 
the two conditions. They are still related to each other 
as opposites. But, really, what has all this to do with 
moral qualities? The logician does not connect moral 
evil or moral good with fire and ice, stocks and stones — 
only by association; of themselves they have no intrinsic 
morality. 

None will dispute that the brain is the organ of the 
human mind. Phrenology, received into the pantheon 
of the sciences, admits man to be a moral being, hav- 
ing moral faculties. Moral being implies moral law, 
and moral law implies not only conscience and freedom, 
but moral government and compensation. Conscience 
in connection with moral judgment ever prompts to 
the right; but the reflective organs in connection with 
moral consciousness, must ever determine what the 
right is. This applies to every scale of human life. 

" Green apples are good," says a writer — " good in 



*fl 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 15 

their place as the ripened ones of October." The pro- 
position is a bald sophism. Neither green nor ripened 
apples are good. No moral quality inheres in apples. 
They are neither good nor evil, because moral quali- 
ties pertain to moral beings— not to unconscious fruit 
or blind forces. 

Good and evil are moral conditions, each positive 
according as it becomes the leading force in purpose or 
quality of character. Hate, that stirs the murderous 
intent, lifts the hand and sends the dagger into its vic- 
tim for a selfish end, is just as positive as love equally 
earnest in forgiving the murderer, under the law of 
reform. Malice, that, with cold foresight and deter- 
mination, plots to pursue innocence and gratify fiendish 
instincts, is just as positive as mercy that unfalteringly 
weeps over trespass and forgets the wrong. 

Nero's hellish fiddling over the crackling flames of 
burning Eome— was it good? Will you affirm that 
the deed steeled those Christians to greater vio-i lance, 
and here is the good? As if the contrast of moral 
righteousness, thus provoked to activity, were the 
apologist for such human malignancy! There stands 
the bare fact — murder! — was it good? 

But here comes the " old saw: " " Who made Nero? 
Did he not act true to his conditions?" 

What do you mean by conditions? Do you mean 
that conditions compelled the murderous act? that con- 
ditions alone mechanically forced the fiddling? If 
this is the position of the objector, it virtually unmans 
Nero and transforms him into a human-shaped piece 



16 THE GADAKENE. 

of mechanism, minus volition of will and a moral 
nature. 

As a Spiritual Philosopher, asking this question — 
Who made Nero? — you deny the fundamental princi- 
ple of your belief. As put, it implies a personal God 
who fashions arbitrarily as the potter does the clay. 
The very implication is a charge against a personal 
God for the existence of such a monster. If, with 
honest concession, you affirm that his parents or pre- 
ceding parents, together with his after surroundings, 
manufactured Nero's life into such a mold, you have 
only shifted the responsibility, making culpability 
lodge where it more naturally belongs. So there is, 
argue as you will, an evil still, and a moral responsi- 
bility somewhere. 

As God, the Absolute Energy, or Impersonal Spirit, 
governs the Universe by inflexible law, the divine effort 
must ceaselessly tend to the mitigation of evil — not as 
excusing, but as overcoming evil with good. An emi- 
nent New-Church writer affirms this : " It is therefore 
obvious that the condition of the whole, of all the 
human race considered as one, must be constantly and 
eternally improving. * * * As the heavens grow 
in their perfection, the earths receive through them 
more fully of the divine life, for the heavens are the 
mediums through which that life passes; and thus 
improvement, eternal progress, is the constant law of 
the universe." 

Character is the reflex action of soul-affection. 
" As a man thinketh, so is he." Those who have but 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 17 

little sense of moral responsibility are quite indifferent 
to moral conduct. When a man pronounces judgment 
favorable to vice, is lie not to be judged by his own 
judgment? Does not a careless apology, or argument 
for evil, implicate one as engulphed in the love of evil? 
The higher the moral altitude attained, the more 
exquisitely keen are the soul's distinctions between 
good and evil; and the more intense the pain at the 
discovery of the least moral taint upon the charac- 
ter. Not that such an individual's charity is less for 
the erring, but that his capacity for weighing the suf- 
ferings incidentally resulting from the commission of 
evils, is more sensitive and tender in sympathy, and 
better adjusted to the absolute relations of justice and 
love. 



ANCIENT MORALS. 



The distinction between good and evil, right and 
wrong, has ever marked the ages of human civilization, 
showing a common moral inheritance here which we 
of the nineteenth century can but cherish as the way 
to heaven. The testimony of the seers and moralists 
of ancient days, whose lives were self-abnegating and 
whitened by adversities in the struggle to attain the 
highest and best of character, unmistakably shows that 
man, in all ages, has discerned our law, requiring that 
moral evil must be overcome with the merciless rigor 
that a wise man removes a disease or physical evil from 
his body. 

From the great ocean of moral law in the past, let 

2 y 



. 



18 THE GADAKENE. 

us glean a few jewels, and learn not only charity, but 
purity, as the law of God written upon our hearts: 

" My doctrine is simple and easy to understand. It 
consists only in having the heart right, and in loving 
one's neighbor as one's self." — Confucius. 

"Generosity, liberality, and benevolence, are more 
conformable to human nature, than the love of pleasure, 
of riches, or even of life." — Cicero. 

" Whosoever wishes to be happy must attach him- 
self to justice, and walk humbly and modestly in her 
steps." — Plato. 

" Do what you know to be right without expecting 
any glory from it." — Demojphiles. 

"The virtuous man buries in silence his good 
deeds." — Plutarch. 

In Plutarch, and the yet later writers, Seneca and 
Epictetus, the like sentiments are found. Marcus Aure- 
lius, the philosophic Emperor, compares the wise and 
humane soul to a " spring of pure and sweet water, 
which, though the passer-by may curse it, continues to 
offer him a draught to assuage his thirst; and even if 
he cast into it mire and filth, hastens to reject it, and 
flows on pure and undisturbed." We are also reminded 
of the equally beautiful image in the Oriental apologue 
of the sandal tree, which, in the moment when it falls 
before the woodman's stroke, " gives its fragrance to 
the axe which smites it with death." 

And so the following Pythagorean and Brahminic 
precepts drift the grateful soul toward the same safe 
harbor of rest: 



MOKAL GOOD AND EVIL. 19 

"Every soul is a repository of principles. In it 
centres the good of good things, and to it there clings 
the evil of things depraved." 

" Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified 
by truth; the vital spirit, by theology and devotion; 
the understanding, by clear knowledge." 

" The resignation of all pleasures is far better than 
the attainment of them." 

" The organs being strongly attached to the sensual 
delights, cannot so effectually be restrained by avoid- 
ing incentives to pleasure as by a constant pursuit of 
divine knowledge." 

" Iniquity, once committed, fails not of producing 
fruit to him who wrought it, if not in his own person, 
yet in his sons; or, if not in his sons, yet in his 
grandsons." 

The five commandments of the Buddhist religion 
which was established centuries before the Christian 
era, and counts among its adherents more millions than 
any other church, are these: 

" 1. Thou shalt not kill. 2. Thou shalt not steal. 

3. Thou shalt not commit adultery, or any impurity. 

4. Thou shalt not lie. 5. Thou shalt not intoxicate 
thyself with drink." 

And we would reckon in this same category of moral 
credit all that Christianity contains of the good. 

"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have 
entered into the heart of man the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him." 

" The recollection of one upward hour," says Perci- 



20 THE GADAEENE. 

val, " hath more in it to tranqiiilize and cheer the 
darkness of despondency, than years of gayety and 
pleasure." 

Our transcendent law ever in vogue, what is the 
moral profit of arguing in favor of a sophism which 
the ages of human wisdom reject? 

ARE THEKE EVIL SPIRITS? 

That man has a conscious existence in another life 
is demonstrated by the aspirations of his higher nature, 
by the logic of universal growth, by the testimony of 
the ages, by the tangible evidences of the spiritual 
phenomena. 

The spectral analysis rests upon the now established 
fact, that matter of a nature common to that of the 
earth, and subject to its laws, exists throughout the 
stellar universe. "What is thus true in a physical sense 
is true in a moral. As atom is conjoined with atom, 
as ether is composite, giving forth by motion its innate 
life, and light, and color, and transformation, so is the 
relation of mind with mind, allied telegraphically with 
all worlds, and the inhabitants of all worlds, intimately 
here as the physical body with its spiritual. As youth 
bears upon manhood, and thence manhood upon old 
age, so does the earth life bear upon the future charac- 
ter of the immortal spirit. As no physical force is lost, 
but only transferred, so no moral force can be neutral- 
ized by transitions from earthly to heavenly residences. 
Nature knows no spasms. A sudden leap from vice 
to virtue, from folly to wisdom, contrary to life's process 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 21 

of development, would be equivalent to annihilation. 
Only the coarsest logic will affirm that chemical changes 
of body will produce a moral regeneration. They may 
arrest or remove obstructions, like medicines, but moral 
cures, or growths, are the results of spirit influx and 
culture. 

Death, the dropping of the garment in which the 
spirit has lived, is, in the sense of change, continuously 
operative; but does this change moral character? Are 
we better for wearing off a little epidermis by the toils 
of life? Are we to-day sinners, but, having had a 
night's sleep, are we angels on the morrow? Does a 
walk through a college transfer a boor into a philoso- 
pher? If the deaths, or wastes of the body, thus far, 
have wrought no sequential regeneration, how can a 
future death do it, since it is the same in physical ratio 
as already experienced? If the theory of the Old 
School Universalists were true, that death regenerates, 
why not at once blow out the brains and sip the sweets 
of paradise? and enjoy what the poet sung of the 
Nazarene's betrayer: 

"Judas, with a cord, 
Outstripped his Lord, 
And got to heaven first! " 

The same clairvoyant and phenomenal evidences 
that prove the existence of spirits, prove the existence 
of evil, or unregenerate spirits. By the immutable 
law of spiritual gravity, these are here — here in the 
spirit world that heaves and laves all around us like an 



22 THE GADARENE. 

ocean of ether. In old speculative India, in mystic 
Egypt, in sunny Syria (birthplace of the Old and New 
Testaments), in Persia among the star-gazers, in classic 
Greece and opulent Rome, among the stern Scandina- 
vians, sable Africans, South Sea Islanders, and wild 
Indians, together with the personal experiences of 
millions of Spiritualists in the present time, we have 
the same chain of testimony, the same willing, or 
unwilling, witnesses to the existence of evil spirits and 
their power over mortals. 

The wilderness of proof substantiating this position 
almost staggers us. We are at a loss what to reject 
from the mountainous pile of evidences which the 
accumulating ages have developed for the startled 
inspector. 

In a recent pamphlet, entiled " The Spiritual Philos- 
ophy versus Diabolism," the author attempts to argue 
away the perils of infestation on the hypothesis that 
" intelligence in the higher life so controls the law of 
intercourse of spirits with men in the flesh, that the 
evil disposed are restrained of this intercourse." 

This is virtually making a higher plane of spirits a 
police institution ! The author says : " No villain exists 
in the spirit world but who has a master there — one 
who is adapted to him, and can cast over him such a 
psychological influence as to restrain him at his will. 
This determines the subjection of the evil minded to 
control, in spirit life, and such control as robs them of 
the power to do the injury that is in their hearts to do 
to mortals and spirits." 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 23 

What better is this than earth's slavery revamped in 
the spirit world? The force of such a police cannot, 
of course, regenerate the wicked, but only restrain 
them, as in a prison. The arbitration of angels must 
be a fruitless business in those courts of higher law. 
We prefer to be excused from the office of watching 
devils, as picket guards in paradise. Attending to such 
business in this world is not considered a very exalted 
profession. It is just as possible for the evil minded 
to communicate through their thought and affec- 
tion as the reverse class; the law being the same. 
Even if arbitrarily restrained, the peril is by no means 
shut off. So long as evil continues, even if the perpe- 
trators are imprisoned, the spiritual part will act and 
go forth, seeking its own. Arbitrary restraint never 
regenerates. 

The common plea mooted by this class of reasoners 
is, that, as God is good, " His imperative will " would 
never permit " the depravity of one sphere to be propa- 
gated to a lower." By parity of reasoning, God, being 
good, He would never permit depravity to exist at all. 
Evil does exist in this world, and this of itself over- 
throws this begging philosophy. Coming to our senses, 
the point is this: We are in the universe, subject to 
the influences of mind from all possible sources, above 
and below, whose temptations and invitations test our 
strength and grade us, up or down, according to our 
innate affection and practice. 

This, attributed to William Denton, is decidedly 
pointed : " The miser returns cursing the fatal appetite 



24 THE GADARENE. 

which binds him in the metalic chain forged by his own 
avarice; the sensualist lives in the agonizing retrospect 
of lost delights, for which the nature of spiritual exist- 
ence furnishes no satisfaction." 

Some of our prominent Spiritualists have taken the 
ground in their works impliedly averse to the continu- 
ance of evil beyond this life, maintaining that death 
is a " sieve," sifting out gross substances or adhering 
contamination, leaving the spirit innately pure. The 
idea is pleasant; and how much more pleasant, if our 
birth into this world were a " sieve," and all of us were 
holy. 

In Mr. Davis' Dtakka, a stirring work, he logically 
traces the ratio of worlds, and admits all we claim — 
that there are spirits " morally deficient and affection- 
ately unclean " — a good round million of them residing 
in the constellation Draco Major — whose chief busi- 
ness in our world is " jugglery and trickery, witticisms, 
invariably victimizing others — secretly tormenting 
mediums, causing them to exaggerate in speech, and 
to falsify by acts ; unlocking and unbolting the street 
doors of your bosom and memory; pointing your feet 
into wrong paths; and far more. Nevertheless, the 
good physicians of love and ministers of truth labor 
among the Diakka * * till all are reached and 
delivered from the dense wilderness of discord." 

In a recent work, entitled the " Masterion," the 
author says: " If spirits are wicked, we should know 
it. If our kindred in immortality, our fathers, mothers, 
sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins, have degen- 



j 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 25 

erated, or have been denuded of common sense, as a 
consequence of their transition to another condition of 
existence, then certainly it behooves us to make our 
stay upon earth as long as possible; nor should we 
yearn to know of a state of being which degrades our 
happiness, or bemeans our intelligence. * * * No, 
no; such opinions are as ficticious as the fleeting wind. 
We may simplify the honor, the goodness of the Divine 
Being by circumlocution in thought and expression; 
may barter away our joy and hope in a raid of words 
upon the godliness of spirits because they rap their 
notes of warning to the world ; because they tip tables 
and make mock faces to establish the fact of their exist- 
ence and prove their identity." 

These writers who expect all the heavens to be clean, 
though the earth be foul, are like children who estimate 
spirits, as they did mortals, to be perfect, on the prin- 
ciple that " distance lends enchantment to the view." 
A closer contact with the people of both worlds, evolv- 
ing conflicts and sorrows, tones such fancies to stern 
fact — that evil is, and we must overcome it to be angels 
indeed. What means this moral sentiment that sounds 
the deeps of our characteristic worth — " He that over- 
cometh shall inherit all things?" Does it not cite to 
what we feel is true, that there is temptation to resist 
and good, to attain? and when such a conquest is 
gained, that the victors, whether they are our relatives 
or not, on this side or the other, are ministrants of 
holy services? 

Such writers ever argue the non-existence of falses 
3 



26 GADAKENE. 

in the other world, because it is not like God! As if 
the Divine were any more there than here! This leg- 
ging for universal purity of the All-Pure is a sign of 
a deficiency in the devotee. It dates from the defunct 
dogma of an organized personal Deity, who, being 
infinitely good, could not create evil. What is the use 
to build on fancy? The unsubdued, the unbalanced, 
the selfish, the oppressive— look at these as facts, right 
in the face, and fight the battle of life like a moral 
hero. This were far better. Stoical Philosophy never 
grasps the problems of life as they are. This making 
a personal God responsible ! Rid the bewildered mind 
of the personality, and this ignis fatuus vanishes into 
thin air. Consider God as the esse of things, imper- 
sonal, subject like us to law, over us, in us, of us; and 
that as we use or abuse our privileges, so is our weal 
or woe; then have we legun to know something of the 
necessity of " overcoming evil with good." 

CHKYSALIS OF THE SPIRIT. 

The spiritual man lays aside the physical body at 
death, as the butterfly does its chrysalis. As the chaff 
envelopes the wheat, and the pulp of the wheat envel- 
opes the germ, so the physical body envelopes the 
spiritual body, and this in turn centres or holds the 
eternal principle which we call spirit. Death is but 
the severing of the outer envelope— the physical body; 
and it can no more change the moral character than 
the dropping of chaff can change the nature of wheat. 
The office of death, therefore, is simply the emanci- 



MORAL GOOD AND EVIL. 27 

pation that affords the liberty of spiritual growth. It 
is the ever-attendant angel of progress; but progress 
itself is the tenure of life — life's nnfoldiiigs. It is not 
a " sieve," as by comparison is vaguely used, straining 
out human imperfections; but the dismantling of 
earth's garment that the spirit may clothe itself anew 
according to its moral altitude attained by growth 
incident to obedience to all the laws of its being. 

All moral acts pertain to the intellectual and spirit 
ual, and not to the body except medially. Is it the 
foot that sins when treading on forbidden grounds? 
the hand that steals? Are not these, rather, the imple- 
ments of conscious force operating in and by them? 
Without this force, or spirit, man is but a corpse, and 
a corpse never violates law. The dogma that a 
debauched sensualist, steeped in crime, crimsoned in 
blood, principled in life-long evils, is not the same 
man — the vicious spirit — when first awakened to con- 
sciousness in the future life, finds no parallel in this 
life's experiences, in moral philosophy, or the teachings 
of angels. 

Everything physical has its counterpart in the spir- 
itual. The physical body is but the soul's instrument 
of use for a season. All sensations, all thought, reason, 
moral responsibility, pertain to soul — the inner man. 
When the twin brother of life — death — puts its frosty 
seal upon the forehead, fortunes and all else are left 
behind, save our unmasked selves. Rank and honors 
avail nothing " over there." Even reputation clings 
to us no more. Stripped of staff and scrip, we enter 



.-..'; nuw HHBHBB 



a 



28 GADARENE. 

the next state of existence the real men and women 
we are, bearing with us the plans, purposes, achieve- 
ments, and deeds done, as records. These determine 
the commencement of future destinies. 

This an unreal, that is a real life; this a shadowy, that 
is a substantial existence of activity and progression. 
Swedenborg tells us he frequently met " new-born 
spirits, that could not believe they had died." Their 
bodies, forms, limbs, were perfect in shape. Every- 
thing was real — familiar even, only more etherialized. 
And then their affections, their attractions, being 
earthly, they still lingered in and around their mortal 
homes. 



J 



CIIAPTEK II. 

DEMONS AND GODS. 

The terms gods, lords, angels, demons, spirits, were 
used interchangeably by Egyptian, Phoenician, Persian, 
and the more ancient Grecian writers. This under- 
stood, much of the mysticism connected with God and 
Jehovah, Lord and Angel, as used by theologians, is 
cleared away. In the Old Testament we read: "In 
the beginning Gods (Elohim, plural) created the heaven 
and the earth." Hesiod has a poem entitled Theogo- 
nia, giving the " generation of the gods." " In the 
book of Moses," says that learned church authority, 
Calmet, " the name of God is often given to the angels. 
* * * Princes, magistrates, and great men are 
called gods. If a slave is desirous to continue with 
his master, he shall be brought to the gods. The Lord 
(an exalted angel) is seated amidst the gods, and judges 
with them." 

The testimony of the truly eminent Philo Judceus, 
relative to the identity of god, lord, angel, spirit, etc., 
is exceedingly important. We quote from Yonge's 
translation: "Those (referring to gods) of the most 
divine nature are utterly regardless of any situation on 
earth, but are raised to a greater height, and placed in 
the ether itself, being of the purest possible character, 
(29) 



30 THE GADAKENE. 

which those among the Greeks that have studied phi- 
losophy, call heroes and demons, and which Moses, 
giving them a most felicitous appellation, calls angels, 
acting, as they do, the part of ambassadors and mes- 
sengers. Therefore, if you look upon souls and demons 
and angels as things differing indeed in name, but as 
meaning in reality one and the same thing, you will 
thus get rid of the heaviest of all evils — superstition. 
For as people speak of good demons and bad demons, 
so do they speak of good and bad souls; and also of 
some angels as being by their title worthy ambassa- 
dors * * . * from God to men, being sacred and 
inviolable guardians; others as being unholy and 
unworthy. Hence, the Psalmist David speaks of the 
1 operation of evil angels.' " 

In harmony with the above, from a different source, 
yet in confirmation of the same general idea, we quote 
from the third volume of Plato, by Burges, Trinity 
College, Cambridge: " They are demons, because pru- 
dent and learned. * * * Hence, poets say well, 
who say that when a good man shall have reached his 
end, he receives a mighty destiny and honor, and 
becomes a demon according to the appellation of pru- 
dence." 

Concurring with the general belief of those ages, 
the Grecian poet Hesiod, in his "Works and Days," 
says: 

" But when concealed had destiny this race, 
Demons there were, called holy upon earth, 
Good, ill-averters, and of men the guard." 



DEMONS AND GODS. 31 

Plato, in the Timceus, says: "That between God 
and man are the daimones, or spirits, who are always 
near us, though commonly invisible to us, and know 
all our thoughts. They are intermediates between gods 
and men, and their function is to interpret and convey 
to the gods what comes from men, and to men what 
comes from the gods." 

In Plato's "Apology and Republic," (pages 31 and 
40, book ten) that great master Grecian says: "The 
demons often direct man in the quality of guardian 
spirits, in all his actions, as witness the demon of Soc- 
rates. * * * There are two kinds of men. One 
of these, through aptitude, will receive the illumina- 
tions of divinity, and the other, through inaptitude, 
will subject himself to the power of avenging demons." 
i * They (the poets) do not compose by art, but 
through a divine power; since, if they knew how to 
speak by art upon the subject correctly, they would be 
able to do so upon all others. On this account, a deity 
has deprived them of their senses, and employs them 
as his ministers and oracle singers, and divine prophets, 
in order that, when we hear them, we may know it is not 
they, to whom sense is not present, who speak what is 
valuable, but the God himself who speaks, and through 
them addresses us. We are not to doubt about thole 
beautiful poems being not human, but divine, and the 
work, not of men, but of gods; and that the poets are 
nothing else but interpreters of the gods, (that is, 



32 THE GADAKENE. 

spirits,) possessed by whatever deity they may happen 
to be." 

The Kabala, containing a comprehensive account of 
magic among the Jews, teaches that, besides the angels, 
" there is a middle race of beings usually called Ele- 
mentary Spirits. These are the dregs, or lowest of 
the spiritual orders. Their head is Asmodeus. They 
are of a wicked disposition, deceive men, and delight 
in evil." 

TESTIMONY OE THE DOCTORS. 

Egyptian Jews, most German rationalists, and not a 
few Universalists, who theorize outside of facts and 
the recently well-established principles of psychologic 
science, regard " demons," all the spiritual beings of 
the spirit world, as perfect and holy. The orthodox, 
who believe in a semi-omnipotent devil — sectarists, the 
superstitious and ignorant, consider all demons " evil 
spirits^" that is, irredeemable, fallen angels. The truth 
lies between these extremes. Demons are simply the 
immortalized men of the other life — spirits, occupying 
various planes or mansions in that " house not made 
with hands " — the temple of the Eternal. 

" Demons were of two kinds: the one were the souls 
of good men, which, upon the departure from the body, 
were called heroes, were afterwards raised to the dig- 
nity of demons, and subsequently to that of gods.''' 1 — 
Kitto. 

Demon, "the spirit of a dead man." — Jones. 

Demon, "a spirit, either angel or fiend." — Cudiuorth. 






DEMONS AND GODS. 33 

"Demons and gods were considered the same in 
Greece. " — Grote. 

"The heathen authors allude to possession by a 
demon (or by a god, for they employ the two words 
with little or no distinction) as a thing of no uncom- 
mon occurrence." — Archbishop Whately. 

" All Pagan antiquity affirms that from Titan and 
Saturn, the poetic progeny of Coelus and Terra, down 
to ^Esculapius, Proteus, and Minos, all their divinities 
were ghosts of dead men, and were so regarded by the 
most erudite of the Pagans themselves." — Alexander 
Campbell. 

" The notion of demons, or the souls of the dead, 
having power over living men, was universally preva- 
lent among the heathen of those times, and believed 
by many Christians." — Dr. Lardner. 

Worcester, in his synonymes, says: "Demon is 
sometimes used in a good sense; as, ' The demon of 
Socrates, or the demon of Tasso ' " — and then, to illus- 
trate, quotes from that fine author, Addison: "My 
good demon, who sat at my right hand during the 
course of this vision," etc. 

That learned savant, Cardan, honored with the 
friendship of Gregory XIII., says: "No man was 
ever great in any art or action, that did not have a 
demon to aid him." 

Traverse Oldfield entertained the idea that the Greek 
(laimon was nothing but the nervous principle; and is 
not this a close approximation to the office of spirits? 
The "nervous principle" is certainly the implement 



31 THE GADAEENE. 

of the gods, and can be used for good or evil, as the 
will of the spirit determines. 

NEW TESTAMENT DEMONIACS. 

Aware that the demoniacal possessions of the New 
Testament have been the subject of much discussion 
for centuries by the learned, we present certain logical 
facts for candid consideration. The position of " Ra- 
tionalists " and " Universalists " that these demons 
were nothing more than lunacy, epilepsy, and sundry 
diseases, must seem to every sound thinker exceedingly 
weak and illogical. 

If -demons were simply natural, physical diseases, 
was it not a matter of the highest importance that 
Jesus should have undeceived his cotemporaries, Jews 
and Greeks, upon this vital point, thus correcting the 
erroneous and pernicious philosophy of the age? But 
he did not in a single instance. To say, as some have, 
he accommodated himself to the prevailing notions of 
the times, is simply to say, in the language of another, 
" He who came to bear witness to the truth, accommo- 
dated himself to a lie." Suppose we were to substitute 
diseases for demons, in the scriptural accounts. Take, 
as an illustration, Mark xvi: 9, reading, "Now when 
Jesus was risen, * * * he appeared first to Mary 
Magdalen, out of whom he had cast seven devils " — 
daimonia, demons. Who, with any scholarly reputa- 
tion at stake, would assume the responsibility of giving 
us such a rendering and exegesis as the following: 
" Out of whom he had cast seven devils " — that is, 



DEMONS AND GODS. 35 

seven diseases, lunacy, lumbago, dyspepsia, rheuma- 
tism, colic, pneumonia, and the measles! 

These obsessing demons could not have been diseases 
and lunatics alone, because they conversed intelligently 
with Jesus, uttering propositions undeniably correct, 
and such as were happily adapted to the occasion. On 
the other hand, Jesus addressed these demons — 
spirits — as thinking, conscious individualities, and 
commanded them, as beings distinct from the obsessed 
or psychologized parties, to leave. 



CIIAPTEB III. 

MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHEEES. 

Whether matter be gaseous or gross, it is one and 
the same in essence. Dissolve the granite into its orig- 
inal elements, summarily they are still granite. Form 
is only the crystallization of primal ether — what an 
ingrained law constructs. 

" The scheme of things with all the sights you see 
Are only pictures of the things that be. 
What you call matter, is but as the sheath 
Shaped ever as bubbles are by spirit-breath. 
The mountains are but firmest clouds of earth, 
Still changing to the breath that gave them birth. 
Spirit aye shapeth matter into view, 
As music wears the form it passes through. 
Spirit is lord of substance, matter's sole 
First cause, and forming power, and final goal. ,, 

It was a doctrine of Leucippus and Democrites — 
the masters of Epicurus — several centuries before the 
Christian era, that matter is composed of invisible, but 
indestructible corpuscles, diffused through all space; 
that they are endowed with shape and motion; that 
they have an evolution and differentiation by means 
of relationship; that a central principle, or instinctive 
intelligence, causes these phenomena. Descartes, Leib- 
nitz and other modern thinkers, reproducing the 
(36) 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 37 

ancient philosophers for a basis, have discovered by 
closer analysis the chemical and ethereal constituents 
of these corpuscles; that by their own innate, affini- 
tive and repellent motions, each evolves around itself 
a refined sphere, which, blended together, constitutes 
a universal medium that was suspected by the ancients. 

A UNIVERSAL ELASTIC MEDIUM. 

This medium is elastic, so attenuated as to elude our 
physical senses, or even the spectroscope which recog- 
nizes the most infinitesimal gaseous atoms. It performs 
for the universal worlds in space what our nervous 
system does for its grosser body. It transmits the 
impressions of solar light, heat, magnetism, electricity, 
and atinic force. All-pervading, it is the nerve organ- 
ism, the esse of things, the material out of which is 
developed our spiritual bodies. 

Rev. Charles Beecher, as if to undermine the basis 
of Spiritualism, but thus virtually acknowledging it, 
says of this ethereal medium: " It was the Qoaiq of 
Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen; the anima (as 
opposed to animus) of the Romans; and the Sephiroth 
of the Jewish Cabala. From this ' soul of the world ' 
of the pre-Platonic Orientals, all souls are emanations. 
The ' demons ' of the Greeks, from Plato down to Jam- 
blichus, were nothing but this. By this the magicians 
of the Nile, and the jugglers of the Ganges, wrought 
their wonders. This was the true Python, source of 
all divination, magic, and witchcraft, in annals sacred 
and profane. This is the true secret of the Protean 



38 THE GADARENE. 

wonders of Rhabdomancy, clairvoyance, and animal 
magnetism." 

"The occult science," says Father Rebold, "des- 
ignated by the ancient priests under the name of 
regenerating fire, is that which at the present day is 
known as animal magnetism — a science that, for more 
than three thousand years, was the peculiar possession 
of the Indian and Egyptian priesthood, into the knowl- 
edge of which Moses was initiated at Heliopolis, when 
he was educated; and Jesus, among the Essenian 
priests of Egypt or Judea; and by which these two 
great reformers, particularly the latter, wrought many 
of the miracles mentioned in Scriptures." 

Baron Eeichenbach, detecting these elemental spheres 
around objects, which he termed " odylic," made many 
interesting experiments, indicating by what subtle 
influences we are all moved. Thus, seizing upon the 
very soul of this spiritual atmosphere, he was able to 
trace the photographing of mineral and metalic sub- 
stances upon each other, of animals on animals, of 
man on man. He found that stars and clusters of 
stars have a magnetic influence peculiar to their aura. 

SPHERES OF THINGS. 

The experiments of many media have revealed a 
new magnetic science, of the greatest utility to the 
world. As every atom, every pebble, every mineral, 
every metal, every vegetable, every animal, is in sphered 
with its own aura, there is here a talismanic line of 
invisible communication, detectable always by sensitive 






MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 39 

persons. Our clothes are pervaded with our spheres. 
Some one says that the sick consumptive weaves in the 
garment she makes a sickly element. Every one knows 
that food in some houses tastes better than in others — 
even if cooked by the same person. Why is food eaten 
out of doors, as in picnics, more palatable than even 
in palaces? Is it not because a freer, better magnetism 
has infused itself through it, out in the broad sunlight, 
under the electric trees? 

Philosophers have been long puzzling their brains 
about the secret causes of civilization and national 
characteristics. Let them study the philosophy of 
spheres, and they will have positive data. Locali- 
ties produce like characterestics on their inhabitants. 
There are places where no exalted spiritual community 
can possibly be generated or developed. Every village 
and city has its peculiar character, by virtue of the 
blended atmospheres of the natural and animal mag- 
netic forces locally exhaled there. 

Certain stones and plants possess a peculiar mag- 
netic power of extracting diseases from the human 
body. Hidden springs of water and mines of oil, and 
minerals and metals, are detectable with certain persons 
of mediumistic powers. The animals and reptiles have 
a power of charming their prey. Man is generally the 
psychological master of the creation. All cower before 
him, when he understands and applies his art. Even 
the vegetable and mineral kingdoms assume new 
phases of being in his cultivated presence. All these 
strange possessions and transformations are due to the 



40 GADARENE. 

electrical action of spheres acting on spheres, the 
superior ever controlling. 

HUMAN SPHERES. 

Mr. Buskin, writing to a friend in the North of 
England, says: "Yon most probably have heard of 
the marvelous power which chemical analysis has 
received in recent discoveries respecting the laws of 
light. My friend showed me the rainbow of the rose, 
and the rainbow of the violet, and the rainbow of the 
hyacinth, and the rainbow of the forest leaves being 
born, and the rainbow of the forest leaves dying. And, 
last,, he showed me the rainbow of blood. It was but 
the three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop 
of water; and it cast its measured bars, forever recog- 
nizable now to human sight, on the chord of the seven 
colors. And no drop of that red rain can now be shed, 
so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and 
the voice of it heard out of the ground." 

The better to comprehend the source and nature of 
our magnetic spheres, and their uses, we quote the fol- 
lowing physiological and psychological analysis of the 
human brain, with its nervous system: " The cerebral 
ganglia," says a writer, " constitute the wdiole upper 
and outer portion of the brain, found in all the higher 
animals. They are composed of globulous matter, 
from which innumerable fibres or threads extend 
toward the centre of the brain. In this globulous 
matter of the cerebrum all psycho-nervous action orig- 
inates, and to it all communications are made that in 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 41 

any way affect the psychical agent. It is this portion 
of the brain that constitutes nearly all the oryans 
assigned to man in the science of Gall; and, according 
to Baellarger, its entire surface, when its convolutions 
are unfolded, is six hundred and seventy square inches. 
Moreover, the cerebral hemispheres of man include an 
amount of nervous matter which is four times that of 
all the rest of the cranio-spinal mass; — more than 
eight times that of the cerebellum, or little brain, 
thirteen times that of the medulla oblongata, and 
twenty-four times that of the spinal cord. And when 
the cerebrum of different animals *is compared, it is 
found to be possessed in a superior degree by those 
animals most elevated in their physical developments. 
It is also found that for each additional convolution of 
the cerebrum some additional psychical function is 
found: thus showing that every particular centre of 
the cerebrum has a particular psychical function, whose 
law is to propagate its influence." 

Dr. J. K. Buchanan, author of several anthropolog- 
ical works of value, says: " Man is becoming more and 
more a being of nerve and brain — the spiritual is 
advancing into a more complete domination of the 
material, and the region of conjunction between the 
material and spiritual, would naturally become the 
dominant region of the brain; and they who, as seers 
or clairvoyants, or mediums, are cultivating these 
higher faculties now, are directly aiding the progress 
of humanity in its higher evolution. 

"Nature offers a coarser structure for coarser duties, 
4 



42 THE GADARENE. 

and a more refined one for subtler functions. The 
ganglion globules of the upper region of the brain are 
very different from the coarser and often multipolar 
structures of the base. The nerve fibre exhibits an 
ascending refinement of structure from that which per- 
forms the coarser muscular functions to that which has 
the more spiritual functions of the anterior lobe. 
Anatomists, without any pre-conceived theories, are 
struck with this fact, and find a difference of size, even 
as great in extremes as one to ten, between the highest 
cerebral fibres and those of the cerebro-spinal system, 
which are devoted -to muscular motion." 

MAGNETIC CURRENTS OF SPHERES. 

By delicate experiments it is ascertained that our 
magnetic spheres have their currental and polar action 
analogous with the electrics circulating around the 
earth; operating by similar laws, suscejDtible to the 
control of more positive forces, and correlated with 
physico-mental batteries in every part of the universe, 
thus allying spirits in the flesh and out of the flesh in 
indissoluble bonds. 

The ancient magicians called these currents, or 
" fluids," as some denominate it, " the living fire." 
Delaage, a French TJiawmaturge, gives it the name of 
V esprit de vie, and says " it has the color of fire on the 
electric spark, and is generative and plastic, inducing 
formation, and bending everything it touches into the 
forms prescribed by the directing intelligence. Soul 
of the world, spirit diffused through all nature, it is 



<m 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 43 

the vital essence of all the bodies which it animates, 
and of all the species in which it is incarnate; and is 
itself profoundly modified by all the mediums which 
it traverses. It is flesh when it traverses the flesh, 
and bone when it traverses the bones; and so truly is 
it the essence of each man, that if you present to a 
lucid somnambulist a lock of hair impregnated with 
this fluid, he will, in his snper-normal condition, 
describe physically and morally the person from whose 
head it was taken." 

The correctness of this statement of Delaage is illus- 
trated in the grafting of scions that preserve their 
identical natures, though supplied with life-juices from 
the adopted tree of a different quality. So with skin- 
grafting, whereby a sore is healed, even though the 
healthy piece of skin may be taken from another 
person. 

MAGNETIC PENETRABILITY. 

The magnetic sphere, or the " psychic force," as the 
the English philosophers call it, which is employed 
by seen and unseen agency to convey intelligence, and 
by which spirits control their media, is, like electricity, 
all -pervading. Dr. William Gregory says: " We easily 
perceive that in highly susceptible cases, distance may 
be a matter of no moment; that our new force or influ- 
ence may, like light, traverse the universe without 
difficulty, while, like heat, it may be able to penetrate 
through all objects, even through walls of brick or 
stone." 



44 THE GADAKENE. 



SPHERES OF SECTS. 



A critical observer says of the " psychic force:" " As 
the human countenance photographs itself upon the 
sensitive silver plate, which it does not touch, so the 
human brain may oclylise itself upon the sensitive cere- 
bral plate of the medium which it does not touch. Or, 
as in every cranium two brains unite to form a double 
cerebral unit, so in space two brains fllmily meshed 
together by odylic threads may virtually unite to form 
a double cerebral unit, the impressions of the stronger 
imparting themselves to and through the weaker. 
Thus things never known to the medium, apparently, 
or to any one in the circle, may be given forth by the 
distant automatic agency of some co-efficient brain." 

All true, and by this law the sects are masked, as in 
"revivals." Thus, the "Holy Spirit," so-called, the 
church name for this " force," is formal and sedate with 
the Presbyterians, calm and rational with the Univer- 
salists, warm and passional with the Methodists and 
Mormons, sullenly devout with the Second Adventists, 
enliveningly varied with the Spiritualists, as are their 
conditions of mind and habits. With the " Jerkers," 
of Kentucky, it is convulsive; with the Shakers and 
Quakers it is spasmodic and inspirational. Its form 
is of the vessel through which it flows, tinging that 
vessel with its own spirit, just as the media are organ- 
ized, educated and affectioned. This law is seen in the 
history of every nervous epidemic of past ages — in the 
Tarantalia of Italy, the St. John's dance of Germany, 
the St. Yitus' dance of France, the preaching mania 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 45 

of Sweden, the witch mania of Salem and Europe, the 
Flagellettes, or Penitents, or Holy Brotherhood, in 
Southern Colorado and New Mexico. 

THE CHINESE REBELLION. 

The Tai-ping rebellion, in China, was of a spiritual 
origin. Though reading of this in the New York 
journals, we could not get at the root of the matter 
until our (junior editor's) visit with Dr. Dunn to this 
ancient country. The daring movement originated 
with Hnng-sew-tswen, born near Canton — a clairvoyant 
seer from infancy! AVhen a lad, he was considered 
strange and eccentric. Returning to his home when a 
young man, from an unsuccessful examination, he was 
attacked with a severe sickness, during which he 
declared " that he had been favored with supernatural 
manifestations and revelations." He felt that "he had 
been washed from the impurities of his nature, and 
introduced into the presence of an august being, who 
exhorted him to live a virtuous life and exterminate 
demons." This " immortalized man, whom he 
often saw, of middle age, and dignified mien, further 
instructed him how to act." Hung called this visitant 
his " elder brother." About this time he read the New 
Testament and declared immediately thereafter " that 
this imposing personage seen in his visions was Jesus 
Christ, the sent-of-God." A scholarly friend of his, 
named Le, uniting with him, they commenced preach- 
ing, baptising, and making converts. During their 
inflammatory discourses, persons would fall into the 



4:6 THE GADARENE. 

trance, speak in strange tongues, and utter alleged rev- 
elations and prophesies. They organized to protect 
themselves and punish their persecutors. This led to 
war; the insurrection became formidable, and for a 
time successful. Multitudes perished by sword and 
famine; vacated fields and burned cities yet in ruins, 
remain to tell the tale of war. The purpose was to 
overthrow the reigning dynasty and destroy the idols 
of the land. 

Iiung-sew-tswen, now putting himself at the head 
of the new Kingdom, was styled Tai-ping tien Kwoh, 
assuming the title " Son of Heaven." He professed 
to have direct communications from God, and spoke 
very familiarly of Jesus as his brother. He contin- 
ually read the Old Testament, and observed religious 
worship in his camp. He assured missionaries that 
his revelations were as authoritative as those of the 
Bible, and he could prove it by his divine gifts. Loyal 
Chinamen call him and his soldiers " long-haired reb- 
els." Successes corrupting his leading officers with 
envies and jealousies in different camps, the Emperor's 
armies, aided by General Ward and the English, the 
Tai-ping rebellion was put down. The struggle con- 
tinued fourteen years. The leading spirit of the 
rebellious host committed suicide. Those caught by 
the government officials were tortured and massacred. 
Hung-sew-tswen's teachings continued to produce their 
results. His admirers believed him to have been God- 
inspired for a purpose, as was Moses, of Hebrew 
memory. 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 47 

CONTAGIOUS MADNESS. 

The terrible scenes which accompanied the final sup- 
pression of the French Commune, in 1870, is attributed 
to a "contagious mental alienation." It was verily a 
magnetic madness — a national tempest arising from 
starvation and epidemical passion. « The minds of the 
Parisians were gradually unhinged by the privations of 
the siege. The revolt of the eighteenth of March gave 
the last blow to brains which were already shaken, and 
at length the greater part of the population went raving 
mad. The records of the Middle Ages are full of similar 
examples. * * * Women are, under such circum- 
stances, fiercer and more reckless than men. This is 
because their nervous system is more developed, their 
brains are weaker, and their sensibilities more acute 
than those of the stronger sex; and they are conse- 
quently far more dangerous, and do much more harm. 
* None of them knew exactly what they were 

fighting for; they were possessed by one of the various 
forms of the religious mania— that which impelled the 
Jansenists to torture themselves, with a strange delight 
in pain of the acutest kind. * * * The men who 
threw themselves on the bayonets of the soldiers in a 
paroxysm of passion, were seen ten minutes after 
utterly prostrate and begging for mercy. They were 
no more cowards in the last state than they were heroes 
in the first — they were simply madmen." 

Such facts should warn us to look into the cause of 
national madness. The toiling millions, as with the 



48 THE GADARENE. 

French Communes, who struck for democratic liberty, 
cannot long endure the burdens laid upon their shoul- 
ders by tyrants. It needs no prophet's eye to see 
that our own America is fast moving into one of these 
magnetic maelstroms! If we would avert a Parisian 
Reign of Terror, instruct the masses in their rights, 
secure them their rights, enlighten them in these 
spiritual laws and social relations. 

VACCINATION. 

"We little know how subtlely and stealthily the fine 
and invisible elements or virus of pestilences and dis- 
eases of varied kinds, fall upon and impregnate our 
very vitals, when we touch them in negative conditions 
of mind and body, induced by fear or neglect. Vac- 
cination, for instance, meant for a benevolent purpose, 
made popular by long use, as a preventive against 
the small -pox, has proved by experiment to be a source 
of incalculable mischief. Every element introduced 
into the human system not only taints it with its own 
nature, but is tainted in turn with the nature of the 
system itself. The cow-pox virus changes the quality 
of the blood, and the blood in turn its quality. Matter 
from persons' arms who are afflicted with consumption 
or scrofula, or syphilitic diseases, will, of course, engen- 
der like diseases and conditions even in the most 
healthful organism. The havoc thus made is fearful. 
Vaccination not only transmits diseases and insanities, 
but moral conditions. A particle of such virus from 
a vicious person whose habits are low and groveling, 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 40 

may induce the worst phases of carnal infestation! 
il Mr. William Field, of Oxford street, England, Pres- 
ident of the Veterinary College, says grease in the horse 
is always accompanied by diseased lungs. W. 0. Col- 
lins, Esq., M. D., says two hundred and fifty thousand 
deaths annually occur from consumption, pneumonia 
convulsions, atrophy, and other strumous diseases, occa- 
sioned or superadded by vaccination. Consumption, 
scrofula, and other blood diseases, were comparatively 
unknown before the introduction of inoculation and 
cow-pox vaccination. ' It is our duty,' said the report 
of the first Vaccine Institution, 'to acknowledge that 
four or five cases have proved fatal from the effects of 
vaccination.' 

" Dr. Bayard, a French physician of eminence, in a 
petition which he sent to the British House of Com- 
mons, by Mr. Ayrton, of the Tower Hamlets, said: 
'Since vaccination, the mortality of the young lias 
doubled; and, contemporaneously with the increase of 
mortality, we have a diminution of births, an increase 
of the general death rates, and the number of second 
marriages.' 

" Dr. Copland, in his Medical Dictionary, page 829, 
says: 'Just half a century has elapsed since the dis- 
covery and introduction of vaccination, and after a 
quarter of a century of transcendental laudation of the 
measure, from well-paid vaccination boards,. raised with 
a view of overbearing the increasing murmurings of 
disbelief in all those who observe and think for them- 
selves, the middle of the nineteenth century finds 



50 THE GADARENE. 

the majority of the profession in all latitudes — doubt- 
ful of its advantages, either from inoculation or 
vaccination.' " 

MAGNETIC DEFILEMENT. 

It is a law. of " second sight," that whoever touches 
a seer during a vision, is enabled, if impressible, to see 
the same. Sensitive persons, by touching Mrs. Hauffe, 
when she had visions of spectres, were made to see 
them also. Our magnetism is virtually our self-hood 
refined into spirit essence, what we are in qualities of 
mental and physical composition, sphered around in 
aural light. Being derived from all we are and all we 
appropriate to use, whatever food we eat, or fluid we 
drink, or clothing we wear, or emotion cherish, or 
habit engender, or thought produce, deposits in this 
sphere its own qualitative essence compounded together 
for crystallization or structure, and thence insphered 
in corresponding magnetism. As the most minute 
grain of musk will scent a room even for centuries, so 
does the least element of our magnetism reflect exactly 
what we are in quality of mind and body. 

As magnetic spheres are communicable, suffusing 
whatever they affinitively touch, we do not wonder the 
ancient Hebrews, understanding these facts, instituted 
severe laws against magnetic defilement. There is 
wisdom in the Levitical laws (Leviticus xxii.) which 
we shall do well to study: 

" Say unto them, Whosoever he he of all your seed, 
among your generations, that goeth unto the holy 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 5 J 

things which the children of Israel hallow unto the 
Lord, having his uncleanness upon him, that soul shall 
be cut off from my presence: I am the Lord What 
man soever of the seed of Aaron is a leper, or hath a 
running issue, he shall not eat of the holy things, until 
he be clean. And whoso toucheth any'thing^ is 
unclean by the dead, or a man whose seed goeth f 
him * f}-- tttL„„„ j- t .1 



rom 



Or whosoever toucheth any creeping thing 
whereby he may be made unclean, or a man of whom 
he may take uncleanness, whatsoever uncleanness he 
hath; The soul which hath touched any such shall 
be unclean until even, and shall not eat of the holy 
tilings, unless he wash his flesh with water." 

POWEE OF MAGNETIC SPIIEBES. 

They are the secret force of battle, and of all action 
A single fact will illustrate it in domestic life: "A 
curious case of mesmerism is recorded by the civil 
surgeon of Iloshungabad, India. A young woman 
named Nunnee, aged twenty-four, married some twelve 
years ago. She, however, did not go to her husband's 
house lor two years afterward. After staying with him 
tor eight years, she suddenly became insensible, and 
remained so for two or three days. She was taken 
back to her mother, and soon got well. Then follows 
a very remarkable history. During the next four or 
five years she never entered her husband's house with 
out falling insensible and remaining so. He was very 
kind and attentive to her; she liked him, but when- 
ever he came into her presence she at once sank into 



52 THE GADARENE. 

this state. This went on till she became emaciated 
and exhausted, and at last her parents applied to the 
court for a separate maintenance for her. While she 
was in court the husband entered, and she instantly 
became insensible, and was carried to the hospital, 
where the case was carefully attended to by Dr. Cullen, 
in March, this year. While in this state her pulse was 
even, breathing soft, her body pliant, but she could eat 
nothing. Experiments were carefully made to see if 
there was no trick about it. While she was in bed, 
her husband was muffled up, and made to walk through 
the ward. She said she felt he was near her, and she 
was by no means well, but had not seen him anywhere 
about. Next day this experiment was repeated, and 
she actually became insensible as before. When the 
husband left the place she recovered. The experiment 
as to the influence of the husband's presence was tried 
in all sorts of ways. He was made to pass behind her, 
and be near her in a separate ward, but this had no 
effect; but whenever he was brought to look on her 
face, though muffled up, or disguised as a policeman, 
as a Sepoy, etc., she was at once influenced. The exper- 
iments continued for about a month, and the conclusion 
was that the husband unconsciously mesmerized her. 
The court came to the conclusion that it was impossi- 
ble that she could live with him, and a separate 
allowance was ordered. The husband was asked to try 
if he could not remove the effect, seeing that he had 
the power to cause it, but he was quite frightened at 



M[TNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 53 

the idea of having the power, and could not control it 
in any way." 

The query often is mooted why the American Indi- 
ans recede and die off so rapidly before the whites. 
It is not so much the conquest of the sword as the 
magnetic disparity between the two races. The mag- 
netism of the whites is deatli to the Indians— poisons 
them, literally sucks out all their life forces. Wild by 
nature, they extract the wild from forests, waterfall 
and battle, and then— if unmolested— are healthful and 
happy, virtuous and spiritual. 

David G. Briton, in his "Myths of the New 
World," speaking of the Indians, says: "In these 
strange duels a Poutrance, one would be seated 
opposite his antagonist, surrounded with the mys- 
terious emblems of his craft, and call upon his 
gods, one after another, to strike his enemy dead. 
Sometimes one, gathering his medicine, as it was 
termed, feeling within himself that hidden force of 
will which makes itself acknowledged even without 
words, would rise in his might, and in a loud and 
severe voice command his opponent to die! Straight- 
way the latter would drop dead, or, yielding in craven 
fear to a superior volition, forsake the implements of 
his art, and, with an awful terror at his heart, creep to 
his lodge, refuse all nourishment, and presently perish. 
Still more terrible was the tyranny they exerted on the 
superstitious mind of the masses.' Let an Indian once 
be possessed of the idea that he is bewitched, and ho 



54 THE GADAKENE. 

will probably reject all food, and sink under the 
phantoms of his own fancy." 

IGNORANT INJURIES. 

Every one who has thought knows that children 
sleeping with old people lose their vitality and droop 
often into premature death, while the aged thus pro- 
long their lives. This is a wrong. Children need all 
their magnetism and all they can glean, to grow and 
take the place of the declining generations, who should 
be glad to go when fully ripe. There are magnetic 
relations here little understood, but by no means " the 
Mysteries of Providence," no more than any other 
secpuence of cause. "We know of frequent instances 
where departed mothers have, from sympathy, drawn 
their children to them — actually slew them oj magnet- 
ism, sometimes to avert a prophetic calamity, and as 
often unconscious in their loving ignorance — though 
spirits — of the death they produce till they are received 
into their bosoms. We know of cases where men have 
killed their wives, and wives. their husbands, by a slow 
magnetic depletion, and where spirits, too, from pur- 
posed design, benevolent or malicious, have educed 
calamities, sickness and death. 



It is well known that the prayer of a powerful revi- 
valist will affect a negative congregation, frightening 
men, women and children into an insane frenzy ; and 
that it will magnetize even a negative person not pres- 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 55 

ent, when all the wills are centered to convert him. 
Under diabolical purposes and infestations, we know 
of parties, in a so-called spiritual circle, who have 
sought to kill another psychologically, and would have 
succeeded but for the timely interference of a guardian 
angel, who reported the plot. We would warn the 
unwary, and enjoin careful inspection and moral cour- 
age, lest the " lively oracles " may prove their snare. 

HEALING SPHERES. 

It is an admitted fact that there are sixty-four 
substances, known as primaries, entering into the com- 
position of all things in Nature. In the original rocks 
they exist in original fibre; in the soils formed by 
depositioni they are finer; in plants and animals, most 
line and active, they seem to lie beyond the reach of 
chemical analysis. As Nature progresses in her serial 
orders, they become more and more potential. Nature's 
laboratory creates differences which escape the chemist. 

When a primary, originally from the rock, thence 
from the soil, thence from the plant, enters the animal, 
it has progressed beyond any known chemical recogni- 
tion; but it is then in full lordship. When, by decay 
of the plant and animal, the primary returns to the 
soil, it is capable of being absorbed by an improved 
plant and animal. By these changes the lichens and 
mosses, the first forms of vegetation, are fitted for 
higher assimilations and the growth of more refined 
and beautiful organisms. 

A double rose cannot be sustained in the fresh debris 



56 THE GADARENE. 

of rock from the mountain; but a single rose gi owing 
there, transplanted to the older soil of the garden, will 
gradually become double. The reason is, the primaries 
have here been in transitional organic life many times, 
furnishing the right elemental nutrition for the new- 
comer. Thus Nature absolutely refuses to retrograde ; 
her decays are sources of progression. 

Sulphate of lime, made from bones, is worth to the 
farmer a great per cent, more than its own weight of 
sulphate of lime from the native plaster of Paris. 
When direct from the rock it is almost inefficient. It 
must first pass through the chain of progression, 
reaching the highest forms of organic life, ere it is 
fitted for the improved agricultural purposes. 

Apple trees will not grow and thrive in certain parts 
of the Northwest, especially in the border regions of 
civilization, not on account of climate, but from want 
of progression in the primaries forming the necessary 
pabulum. 

It is well known that the more refined and medical 
properties are, the more potent they are. No blend- 
ing of ingredients, though the same in kind, will 
produce effects like the waters of the mineral spring. 
Art fails in that it cannot make the soul of things. 
Well-read physicians of the different schools tell us 
that the most powerful medicines, prussic acid, for 
instance, are extracted from the vegetable kingdom. 
Why superior to those from the mineral? Because 
Nature has progressed one step. Could chemistry 
extract the medical properties existing in the organs 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SITJERES. 57 

of animals, we would have an approximate spiritual 
system of cure. Iron from blood must surely be more 
efficacious than iron from the mine held in similar 
solution. It has been proved that medicine from the 
calcined bones of animals possesses altogether a more 
potential virtue than that from the calcined phosphates 
of lime rock. Chemically they are the same, but spir- 
itually they are different. The reason is that the 
primaries in the bones are progressions from the rock. 
What now of magnetism? Its every particle involves 
the nature of the individual whence it is produced. 
Sublimated element, the very essence of all organic 
forms and vitalities in creation, the attenuation of all 
refinements, the spirit's atmosphere charged with all 
medical properties progressed from every order of 
form and being up to man, the super-angel of the mate- 
rial universe, it contains the primaries in their 
perfection, and, according to what is revealed in the 
lower strata of life, already traced, whereby we see 
unity of force everywhere, it is the only thorough and 
searching remedy that can be applied to our physically 
and mentally diseased humanity. It moves and con- 
trols human tides as sent forth from positive wills. It 
is a power, when lovingly used, that shall lift the 
nations to God. If it is spiritualized by coming into 
rapport with the electrifying batteries of spirit-hands, 
spirit-hearts and spirit-brains, as is the case with a 
well-disciplined healing medium, it is the conqueror 
of disease, death, and hell itself. 

" Mrs. Cora L. V. Tappan, on the twenty-seventh 



58 THE GADAKENE. 

of March, 1870, replied, under spirit control, to tha 
inquiry, 'Who should be healers?' substantially as 
follows: 'All are healers, slayers, or both. * * * 
Every one you meet is benefited or injured by your 
magnetism. Medicines differently affect, according to 
those by whom they are administered. The great 
study of healers should be to endeavor to cure only 
those to whom they are medicinal.' " 

SOUND OF SPHERES. 

As all things emit magnetic spheres producing 
sensations, is it not inferential that they move in undu- 
lations, like light? And as they impinge against 
resisting media, doubtless they are accompanied with 
sounds. " The ' Medical Times,' " says the ' Boston 
Transcript,' " translates from a German medical jour- 
nal an account of the first case known of persons 
receiving visual impressions from sound, in the instance 
of two brothers named JNussbaumer, who, when a cer- 
tain note on the piano is struck, have a sensation of a 
certain corresponding color, which is not, however, 
identical for both. For illustration, the note which 
produces in one the impression of dark Prussian blue, 
produces the sensation of a dark yellow in the other. 
One of them, according to the account, has frequent 
sensations of yellow, brown and violet; while blue, 
yellow and brown are frequent with the other. One 
of them never receives the sensation of red, green, 
black or white, in connection with musical notes, 
though the filing of a saw may produce a sensation of 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHERES. 59 

green. Professor Briihl, of Vienna, has thoroughly 
tested this strange case, and has no doubt of" the 
genuineness of the phenomena." 

" This effect of musical tones," adds David Wilder, 
in the 'Banner of Light,' "was observed in this city 
as early as the year 1861, and as the lady who possessed 
the peculiar power is still living here, I have no doubt 
that the experiment then tried might be repeated with 
success. 

"Another lady (the authoress of < Dawn '), at about 
the same time, said she was able to hear sounds, when 
standing before paintings, and it would seem that there 
might also be a third sense opened, and musical tones 
be found to have not only color, but odor." 

" We can endorse the remarks of the writer," says 
the editor of the « Banner," « to the full; Mrs. Conant 
was the first lady referred to, and in our presence she 
has, in a clairvoyant state, frequently described the dif- 
fering colors perceived by her when listening to distinct 
musical sounds." 

How discordant, therefore, are the oscillating forces 
of a malignant sphere! how easily detected! how are 
we repelled from such jars! It is the unutterable 
groamngs from the soul's hells of perversity. How 
sweet and musical the presence of orderly spheres, 
attuned to aspiration after goodness! A holy angel 
trails music all along the shining way. 

Swedenborg discovered the practicability of this 
musical ratiocination in the spiritual world, when he 
said, all the speech of angels, "at the close of every 



t)U THE GADARENE. 

sentence, lias its termination in unity of accent, which 
is merely in consequence of the divine influx into their 
souls respecting the unity of God." 

ODOR OF SPHERES. 

The human soul, like the life of everything that is 
sentient, has a species of its own, evolving an odor- 
ous atmosphere exactly in ratio with its inner affections. 
The experience of every medium substantiates this. 
Undoubtedly whatever we take into our bodies gives 
a shade or odor corresponding with the nature of the 
element. But the data of such " smell " is in the 
spiritual organism. "Whenever the affection and rul- 
ing habit of this is changed, a like change occurs with 
the temperamental odors of our spheres. The Seer of 
Sweden, sensing these variable odors, informs us that 
the " effluvia " from un regenerate spirits is nauseating 
to the interiorly unfolded. He says: " Evil and good 
cannot abide together, and in proportion as evil is 
removed good is regarded and felt, because in the spir- 
itual world there exhales from every one the sphere of 
his particular love, which diffuses itself and gives forth 
its influences all around, causing sympathies and 
antipathies; by means of such spheres the good are 
separated from the evil." 

COLOR OF SPHERES. 

As each mental impulse moves the machinery of the 
body, so in turn this machinery of organs and func- 
tions, as the mind's medium refined into sphere, 
undulates outward like sunbeams, in vibratory action, 
ever voicing the intensity and atomic force of such 



MUNDANE AND CELESTIAL SPHEKES. 61 

impulse, producing corresponding colors, by similar 
laws governing light. Every color in the sphere 
reports the mental and moral status of the individual. 
Spirits and mortals are therefore seen in diversely col- 
ored habiliments. With persons of inverted loves, 
where the habits are gross and animal, such appear more 
or less darkened and hazy. The sphere or clothing of 
a dark spirit is murky. Around the merely intellectual 
it appears clear, cold and positive, with bluish shad- 
ings. Around the genial, spiritual and harmonial, it 
is bright and silvery, mellowing into the golden. This 
idea is elaborated in the Scriptures with reference to 
spirit-clothing. Matthew writes: " The angel of the 
Lord descended from heaven, rolled back the stone 
from the door, * * * and his raiment was white 
as snow." Luke says, " They found the stone rolled 
away, * * * and two men stood by them in shin - 
ing garments." It is said that on the mount, "Jesus' 
face did shine as the sun, * * * and his raiment 
was white as the light." When Cornelius was pray- 
ing, " A man stood before him in bright clothing." 
The light that shone around about Paul was " above 
the brightness of the sun; " and John, entranced upon 
the Isle of Patmos, perceived that those who had 
" overcome were clothed in white robes." 

During one of our (senior editor's) night entrance- 
in ents, we saw in lucid vision a most magnificent 
combination of music, odor and color, all proceeding 
from celestial light; saw spirits, and heard their voices. 
The time will come when earth's inhabitants will make 
such privileges their highest aspiration. 



CIIAPTEE IY. 

OBSESSIONS. 

Obsession is from the Latin obsessio — besieging; 
the state of a person vexed or besieged by evil spirits — 
i. e., lower orders of spiritual beings. 

Necromancy is from the Greek, nekros, a corpse, 
and manteia, divination, implying the method of fore- 
knowing future events by calling upon the dead and 
questioning them. 

Devil and demon should never be confounded. They 
are not interchangeable terms. 

The Greek term for devil is diabolus, and signifies 
slanderer, traducer, spy. The orthodox Dr. Campbell 
says : " The word diabolus, in its ordinary acceptation, 
signifies calumniator, traducer, false accuser, from the 
verb diaballein, to calumniate. Hence we read in 
1 Timothy, iii: 11, 'Even so must their wives be 
grave, not slanderers {diabolus), sober, faithful in all 
things.' Here, the pious women of the early Chris- 
tian Churches are exhorted not to be slanderers — 
literally, ' not to be devils.' Jesus says, John vi: 70, 
" Have not I chosen you twelve? and one of you 
(Judas) is a devil." 

The word Satan, theologically made to signify a 
demi-god of evil, an individual " prince of darkness" 
(62) 



OBSESSIONS. 63 

is the Hebrew common noun signifying an adversary; 
an enemy, an opposition, etc., and is used in that sense 
in the Bible. Thus in 1 Kings xi: 14, Hadad, as an 
adversary of Solomon, is called Satan in the original 
text. Also in the same chapter, twenty-third verse, 
Bezon, an adversary, is denominated Satan. David 
was called Satan in the twenty-ninth chapter of Sam- 
uel: and the angel of the Lord, which appeared unto 
Balaam, or rather unto his ass first, was denominated 
Satan, etc. 

The Yedas, Puranas and Upanishads, abound in ref- 
erences to the Devatas and Soars — good angels and 
subordinate celestial beings — and to the Deics, Asoo?>s 
and Danoos — evil spirits, and the method of destroy- 
ing their influences. Upham says this " doctrine of 
demons, in full force to-day in the island of Ceylon, is 
older than Buddhism. Gotama found it when he there 
made his appearance, in the year 540 B. C." (Ast. Res. 
viii: 531). 

In a moral and social sense, obsession is a magnetic 
monopoly that brings us into unnatural relations, 
educing physical and spiritual discords and diseases. 
Wherever is an obtrusion upon the laws of order, 
whether by force or stealth, unbalance follows; and 
when this obtrusion proceeds from the will of a mor- 
tal or spirit for a selfish end, holding by magnetic 
action, it is obsession. 

Jamblichus, closely observing the phenomena of 
obsession, exactly corroborates modern experience: 

" But, in truth, inspiration is the work neither of 






64 THE GADARENE. 

soul nor body, nor of their entire compound. The 
true cause is no other than illumination emanating 
from the very gods themselves, and spirits coming forth 
from them, and an obsession by which they hold us 
fully and absolutely, absorbing all our faculties even, 
and exterminating all human motions and operations, 
even to consciousness itself ; bringing discourses which 
they who utter them do not understand, but pronounce 
with furious lip, so that our whole being becomes 
secondary and subservient to the sole power of the 
occupying god." 

Hermes says "when a demon flows into a human 
soul he sprinkles in it seeds of his own notions, whence 
such a soul sprinkled with seeds, raised in a fury, 
brings forth wonderful things." 

Zoroaster taught that the clevs or evil spirits "entered 
the bodies of men and produced all manner of dis- 
eases. They entered their minds and incited them to 
sensuality, falsehood, slander and revenge." 

Proclus, of the Alexandrian philosophy, and teacher 
of Athens, classified the spirits in different orders — 
" the highest as uniform and divine." 

Porphyry, a Phoenician of the third century, and a 
professor of the Alexandrian School, spoke often of 
" the power of evil spirits" as causes of " personal 
quarrels and national wars," and affirmed that evil 
demons " inflamed women, corrupted boys, and spread 
terrors among those who did not examine things by 
reason." !Not realizing they were a lower order of 
spirits, " they called them gods, and gave to each the 



OBSESSIONS. G5 

name he claimed for' himself ; but Socrates endeavored 
to expose their practices, and by true reason draw men 
away from their influences, and the demons, by the 
help of wicked men, caused this Grecian philosopher 
to be put to death as an atheist and impious person." 
According to certain phenomena of the present, does 
not this statement concerning Socrates bear the 
semblance of truth? 

JEWISH OBSESSIONS. 

Kenan, in his " Life of Jesus," himself a scholastic 
materialist, attempting to explain all psychic phenom- 
ena by the known laws of physical science, and signally 
failing, as all such do and must — for how can the phys- 
ical correlate the spiritual in full measure, or the 
material eye see principles? — gives credence to the 
prevailing beliefs in obsessions, even with the best 
of scholars: "A singular readiness to believe in 
demons reigned in all minds. It was a universal opin- 
ion, not only in Judea, but in the whole world, that 
demons take possession of certain persons and make 
them act contrary to their own will. The Persian 
dh named many times in the Avesta Aeschma, 
daeva, the ( dw of concupiscence,' adopted by the 
Jews under the name of Asmodeus, became the cause 
of all hysterical troubles among women. * * * 
The vocation of an exorcist was a regular profession 
like that of the physician. * * * Almost down 
to our day the men who have done most for the good 
of their kind (the excellent Vincent dePaul himself!) 
6 



66 THE GADARENE. 

have been, whether they wished it or not, Thaumatur- 
gists. The School of Alexandria was a noble school, 
and yet it abandoned itself to the practice of an 
extravagant thaumaturgy." 

According to the record some of the ancient Hebrew 
prophets were guilty of habitual obsessions; so also 
were certain early Christians accused of " fornication : " 
" "Wherefore their way shall be unto them as slippery 
ways in the darkness; they shall be driven on, and fall 
therein : for I will bring evil upon them, even the year 
of their visitation, saith the Lord. And I have seen 
folly in the prophets of Samaria; they prophesied in 
Baal, and caused my people Israel to err. I have seen 
also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing; they 
commit adultery, and walk in lies; they strengthen 
also the hands of evil-doers, that none doth return 
from his wickedness; they are all of them unto me as 
Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah. 
Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the 
prophets, Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, 
and make them drink the water of gall, for from the 
prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into 
all the land." — Jeremiah xxiii: 11-15. 

MODERN REFERENCES. 

Wolfgang Muscalus, Professor of Divinity at Berne, 
a disciple of Luther, speaking of demons, says: " These 
malignant spirits lurk in statues and images, inspire 
soothsayers, compose oracles, influence the flight of 
birds, trouble life, disquiet sleep, distort the members, 
break down the health and harass with diseases." 



I'lI-KSSIoNH. 



The poet Milton thus refers to the subtilties of 
demons: 

" But when lust, 
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, 
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, 
Lets in defilement to the inward parts, 
That soul grows clotted by contagion ; 
Imbodies and imbrutes till she quite lose 
The divine property of her first being. 
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp, 
Or seen in charnal vaults and sepulchers; 
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave; 
As loth to leave the body that it loved, 
And linked itself by carnal sensuality 
To a degenerate and degraded state." 

"Wesley believed that devils (demons) produced 
disease and bodily hurts; that epilepsy and insanity 
often proceeded from demon influence. He declared 
that if he gave up faith in witchcraft, lie must give up 
the Bible. When asked whether he had himself seen 
a ghost, he replied, ' No; nor have I ever seen a mur- 
der; but unfortunately I am compelled to believe that 
murders take place almost every clay, in one place or 
another.' Warburton attacked Wesley's belief in 
miraculous cures and expulsion of evil spirits; but 
Wesley replied that what he had seen with his own 
eyes, he was bound to believe; the Bishop could believe 
or not, as he pleased." 

HOW SPIRITS TORMENTED SWEDENBORG. 

The following are extracts from Swedenborg's Spir- 
itual Diary: 



68 THE GAD A RENE. 

" September, 1747. — From experience I have learned 
that evil spirits cannot desist from tormenting. By 
their presence they have inflicted pains upon different 
parts of my body, as upon my feet, so that I could 
scarcely walk ; upon the dorsal nerves, so that I could 
scarcely stand, and upon parts of my head with such 
pertinacity that the pains lasted for some hours. I 
was clearly instructed that such sufferings are inflicted 
upon men by evil spirits. 

" October 21, 1748. — Evil spirits throw in trouble- 
some, inconvenient and unhappy suggestions, and 
aggravate and confirm my anxiety. Hence arise the 
melancholy of many people, debilitated minds, delir- 
iums, insanities, phantasies. 

"January 8, 1748. — When I was about to go to 
sleep, it was stated that certain spirits were conspiring 
to kill me, but because I was secure I feared nothing, 
and fell asleep. About the middle of the night I 
awoke, and felt that I did not breathe from myself, but, 
as I believe, from heaven. It was then plainly told 
me that whole hosts of spirits had conspired to suf- 
focate me, and as soon as they made the attempt, a 
heavenly respiration was opened in me and they were 
defeated." 

[The heavenly respiration to which Swedenborg 
refers, or an interior magnetic breathing, is a frequent 
experience among well-disciplined media of to-day. 
It is indeed a "heavenly respiration," and a saving life 
to body and spirit. Only as one becomes spiritual 
and associated with the angels of wisdom can this 



OBSESSIONS. 69 

divine principle be actualized. By such breathing the 
plane of our spiritual status can be determined.] 

"January 11, 1748. — I observed that certain spirits 
often wished to excite me to steal things of small value, 
such as are met with in shops, and so great was their 
desire that they actually moved my hand. 

" February G. — I ascertained that in the world these 
spirits had been trades-people, who, by various artifices, 
defrauded their customers, and thought it allowable. 
Some had been celebrated merchants, at which I won- 
dered. They wander about searching for things to 
steal, and whenever detected are punished with stripes 
and blows. When they were with me, as soon as I 
saw anything in shops, or any pieces of money, or the 
like, their cupidity became manifest to me; for think- 
ing themselves to be me, they urged that I should 
stretch forth my hand to steal, quite contrary to my 
usual state and custom. 

"There was a certain woman (Sara Hesselia) who 
inwardly cherished such an aversion to her parents 
that she meditated poisoning them. She took it into 
her head that I was willing to marry her, and when 
she found out that she was mistaken, she was seized 
with such a hatred that she thought of killing me, had 
it been possible. She died not long afterward. Some 
time before the faculty of conversing with spirits was 
opened in me, I was impelled to commit suicide with 
a knife. The impulse grew so strong that I was forcei 
to hide the knife out of my sight in my desk. I have 
now discovered that Sara Hesselia was the spirit who 



70 THE GADARENE. 

excited the suicidal impulse as often as I saw the knife. 
From this it may appear that men may be unconsciously 
infested with spirits who hated them during their life 
on earth." 

CASE OF RELIGIOUS OBSESSION. 

Jung Stilling, in his Pneumatology, cites thus to a 
case of sensuous obsession, often paralleled these days: 
" A pious young woman visited the religious meetings 
which a pious, but handsome and married man, held 
in his house. By degrees she fell in love with him; 
and as insuperable difficulties stood in the way of her 
attachment, her nerves at length succumbed in the 
conflict, and the poor unfortunate girl became a som- 
nambulist. At the commencement she uttered the 
most sublime and glorious truths in her fits; and she 
generally entered the crisis when present at these reli- 
gious meetings. She predicted many things that were 
to happen in the future, several of which were accom- 
plished. She gained a number of followers; and the 
most sensible and well-informed regarded her as one 
that was inspired by the Spirit of God — in a word, as 
a prophetess. 

" In her fits she received information by degrees that 
the wife of the object of her affection was an abomi- 
nation in the sight of God and his angels. This was 
gradually insinuated with such satanic cunning and 
hypocrisy that the whole company, which consisted of 
several hundred persons, most devoutly believed it. 
The poor woman was, therefore, confined in a remote 



OBSESSIONS. fl 

place, by orders from the invisible world. She lost her 
reason, and died ravin- mad; and the widower then 
married the young woman., also by an order from the 
spirits." 

THE MORZINE OBSESSIONS. 

Speaking of the obsessions at Morzine, Dr. Arthan 
a governmental agent of France, says: " Healthy and 
pons mothers, some with child, some nursing, uttered 
blasphemies and used language which the most 
degraded would stare at. Respectable girls blas- 
phemed all they believed most sacred. Children grew 
strangely and irrepressibly insolent. A general mora] 
disorganization has changed nil the habits of the vil- 
lage. Why has this happened at Morzine? The 
people of the neighboring parish are entirely exempt 
though its chaplets are within a stone's throw of houses 
that have been visited by this spiritual plague. * * * 
"I observed in every case more or less marked: 
"The abnormal development of muscular force. 
« The intellectual excitement producing marvelous 
lucidity of thought, and correctness of language. 
" Cries, blasphemies and imprecations. 
"The personation of the evil spirits by the patients 
who spoke of themselves in the third person always." 

UNHAPPY SPIRITS. 

Emma Hardinge refers, in the following, to Francis 

bmit h, of Baltimore, now summering in the spirit 

world. It is parallel with the experience of thousands • 

A similar case to the above occurs in the history of 



72 



THE GADARENE. 



one of the most pure, estimable and intelligent gentle- 
men whom I have had the good fortune to meet in the 
ranks of American Spiritualists. I speak of the accom- 
plished author of a little book entitled fr Footsteps of a 
Presbyterian.' This gentleman recently informed me 
that his long and highly-prized intercourse with the 
spirit world had been interrupted for a period of sev- 
eral years by the continued infestation of a dark, 
ignorant and malignant spirit, whose presence has 
driven away all other spirits, and forced him, by his 
incessant and detestable influence, to abandon any 
effort to communicate with spirits through his own 
mediumistic organization. Before this terrible haunter 
had entirely possessed himself of his victim, he induced 
him to transcribe a narrative of his earth-life and spir- 
itual experiencies ; and these appeared to me so full 
of instruction and suggestion that I induced my friend, 
after narrating them to me, to put them in print, which 
he has accordingly done in a little pamphlet just 
published, entitled ' Life in the Beyond.' " 

William Howitt, of England, the Christian Spirit- 
ualist, citing to numerous facts in proof of his 
statement, demonstrates that obsessions largely pre- 
vail among so-called Christians, and that the popular 
doctrine of the church, used as an excuse, has an inev- 
itable bias to such infestation. After speaking of the 
elevating influence which results from the communi- 
cations of the good and holy spirits, and the exalting 
effects which their ministrations produce on their 
media, he goes on to say: 



obsessions. 73 

"Far different is the condition of others. They 
desire good equal] y and earnestly; they pray fervently 
and continuously for it; but evil is with them. With 
them the approach of spirits is not a visit, nor simply 
a visitation, but an inroad. They come, the door once 
open, in crowds, in mobs, in riotous invasions. They 
run, they leap, they fly, they gesticulate, they sing, 
they whoop, and they curse. They are the most merry 
and the most bitter of mockers. Wit looms in their 
words, like flashes of internal lightning; pantomime 
is in their action; laughter in their eyes; and a horror 
winch no assumption of innocence can veil, is the 
effluvia of their presence. There is no question with 
the wretched sufferers of their phantasmagorial assaults 
that they are the life and quintessence of hell. Nor 
is it the mind only of the unfortunate one which they 
haunt; they have a power over his material movements 
Ihey move and remove articles; they fling and toss; 
they lude and steal; they put things where they ought 
not to be; they take them from whence they should 
constantly be. Mind, body, soul, memory and imag- 
mation-nay, the very heart-are polluted by the 
ghostly canaille; and the sanctuary of life and the 
dwelling are invaded, disordered, desecrated, and made 
miserable by them. We have known such sufferers, 
and know them still. When they have written, pray- 
ing lor advice, how to get rid of this pestilence, we 
could only say, 'Pray with all your might for it; and 
stick close to the Savior who cast out these tormentors 



74 THE GADARENE. 

in his earth-life. Pray without ceasing; pray in the 
might and faith of Christ.' 

"It has been in vain! ]STo prayer, no agony of 
petition, no persistence of a holy and wrestling exor- 
cism has been able to dislodge the foul and murderous 
crew. There they were, and there they are! 

" But we have not reached the abysmal depth of 
the dark mysteries of the spirit world. There is a fact 
more startling still, if these spirit prowlers on the 
border lands of life are to be credited on their own 
assurances. When asked, and that by different persons 
in different places, ' Why do you intrude on me, and 
persist in your intrusion, though commanded to 
depart? ' the answer has been ' Because we live on you. 
Through your atmosphere we enter into the atmos- 
phere of human life. That is our happiness; we 
know none else. We have none here; here all is dark, 
barren and joyless. We long to be back again in the 
warm, bright life of the earth; and we achieve it 
through you. You are our highway, our bridge, our 
door, along which we travel, over which we pass, and 
through which w T e enter, and again possess the heritage 
w T e had lost. In your emanations we revel; through 
your nostrils we once more snuff up the aromas of the 
earth, the scent of the feast and the wine cup; through 
your eyes open upon us, as of old, all the sweet 
varieties of life.' 

" Struck with horror, one of these persecuted suffer- 
ers exclaimed: 'But this is a species of spiritual 
vampirism ! ' 



obsessions. 75 

" < How so? ' asked one of the tormentors. ' Every 
grade of animal life lives upon another. For your 
physical sustenance you live on the animal tribes; for 
Your spiritual sustenance you live on Christ. lie gives 
himself for the food of mankind. By his flesh and 
blood you exist. He is that living bread which came 
down from heaven, and we live on you and through 
you.' " -' * * 

Commenting on these statements of Mr. Howitt, 
Emma Hardinge adds, in respect to the trial made to 
cast out such spirits in the " name, faith and might of 
Christ," which signally failed: 

" What a comment, too, on the doctrine of vicarious 
atonement and ' salvation through the blood of Christ ' 
is the existence of these legions of undeveloped spirits 
at all! All of them are human spirits— nine-tenths 
of them once belonged to the ranks of Christianity; 
all of them lived beneath its shadow and teachings on 
earth. If Christ came on earth and died to save sin- 
ners, how is it that we hear of such terrible swarms 
of the unsaved? The good do not need saving; the 
bad are evidently not saved. If these tremendous rev- 
elations from the lost souls— the very class for whom 
we are to suppose the wonderful scheme of Christian 
salvation was invented— persist in returning to prove 
the fallacy and failure of that scheme, and even as 
good Mr. Howitt's communication implies, use that 
scheme as an argument why they should prey upon 
those who, in turn, prey upon the body and blood of 
Christ, must we not look soon for a new and more 



76 THE GADAKENE. 

effective scheme of salvation than the old ? ■ — one 
that will, as good old Pompey says, ' save sinners as 
are sinners, not saints as is a shamming by cry- 
ing, 'Lord, have mercy upon us miserable sin- 
ners!' Certain it is, despite all the power, splendor 
and wealth with which blind devotion has uj)held for 
centuries the enormous ecclesiastical hierarchies of 
Christendom, the revelations of modern Spiritualism 
prove with tremendous force that the good and the bad 
are alike in the exact compensation and retribution of 
their earthly acts and deeds, and that neither the name 
nor the blood of Christ have power to control demons, 
or in any way aifect the condition of the human soul 
here or hereafter." 

According to the following statement of William 
Howitt, literary persons, as well as illiterate, fall a prey 
to these magnetic insanities: 

" Bunyan, whose life at times they made a terror of 
darkness and blasphemy, paid no court or homage to 
them, but to very different powers. Cowper, whose 
poetry is especially conspicuous for its sober and sound 
sense, coquetted with no pseudo nymphs from Orcus. 
but was driven by them through the deepest caverns 
of despair, and to the very verge, time upon time, of 
suicide. By a recent Memoir of the Abbe Lamennais, 
we find that was exactly his condition also. The soul 
murderers were upon him with all their inferal power. 
They murdered his peace as completely as if he had 
been the most desperate of criminals; and that noble 
spirit which preached the religion of purity and love 



OBSESSIONS. 77 

in its divinest truth and beauty, was a prey to the 
most agonizing despairs." 

We know of persons, who, fearful of contamina- 
tion and habitually animal, invite what they profess 
to hate. When an evil spirit comes they are mad, 
and vociferate, "Go away, G— d d— n ye!" As if 
such a will could drive away! The very condition 
holds the obsessing influence. None fall so easy a 
prey as the mediumistic. The almost savage demands 
for tests psychologically evoke a disposition to over- 
rate. The electric conditions, thus engendered, defeat 
the object. Hence the " despairs." 

The agency of evil as well as good spirits is almost 
universally conceded by the Spiritual speakers, writers 
and media of to-day. Among them are Allen Put- 
nam, Sam'l Watson, A. E. Giles, S. B. Brittan, W. D. 
Gunning, and other prominent lights both in America 
and Europe. 

"They will deceive us for our amusement."— H T 
Child. 

" Death makes no change in the spirit, morally or 
intellectually."— A. E. Wallace. 

" No doubt millions of spirits are now pursuing, 
practically, earthly careers, drinking and pursuing 
evil or sensous courses." — John Wetherby. 

" The spirit world is as full of liars as this."— Pom- 
eroy's Democrat. 

Says Laura Cuppy Smith: "Like attracts like. 
When, therefore, a visible scamp with a heart full 
of mischief, asks for revelations, he may get them 



78 THE GADAKENE. 

from the invisible scamp, but their authenticity is 
deserving of no more credit than the dispatches of 
some daily papers." 

Henry Ward Beecher, in a sermon on the ministry 
of spirits, vindicating their presence and interest in all 
our affairs, and invoking the " angels of light," traces 
the moral effects of a perverted earth-life into the 
future, and logically and scripturally comes to the con- 
clusion that there are mischievious spirits returning 
to us: 

" Our field of conflict is different from that on which 
men oppose each other. It comprises the whole unseen 
realm. All the secret roads, and paths, and avenues, 
in which spirits dwell, are filled with a great, invisible 
host. These are our adversaries. And they are all the 
more dangerous because they are invisible. Subtle are 
they? We are unconscious of their presence. They 
come, they go; they assail, they retreat; they plan, 
they attack, they withdraw; they carry on all the pro- 
cesses by which they mean to suborn or destroy us, 
without the possibility of our seeing them. When, in 
physical warfare, the enemy that lies over against us 
establishes the line of a new redoubt, we can see that; 
and when a new battery is discovered, a battery may be 
planted opposite to it; but no engineering can trace 
these invisible engineers, or their work. And there is- 
something very august in the thought that the most 
transcendent powers in the universe, that fill time and 
space, are removed from the ordinary sight and inspec- 
tion of men. It is a sublime and awful conception. 



OBSESSIONS. 79 

It produces some such impression on my mind as is 
produced by the idea of haunted houses. 



-X- 



" There are many who no not believe that this world 
16 the sphere of evil spirits. They do not believe that 
the heaven above is haunted; nor that the world 
beneath is haunted; nor that laws, and customs, and 
usages and pleasures, and various pursuits are haunted. 
Ihey do not believe in the doctrine of the possession 
ot spirits. Nevertheless, I confess to you, there is 
something in my mind of sublimity in the idea that 
the world is full of spirits, good and evil, that are pur- 
suing their various errands, and that the little that we 
can see with these bat's eyes of ours, the little that we 
can decipher with these imperfect senses, is not the 
whole ot the reading of those vast pages of that great 
volume which God has written. There is in the lore 
ot God more than our philosophy has ever dreamed of » 
Mr. Beecher maintains that spirits are at work on 
the passions, the tastes and sentiments;" that they 
have "possession of the great facts, and events, and 
constituted agencies of this world "-social, political 
and religious: « No man is a sensible man who says 
that the doctrine of evil spirits is a mere superstitious 
notion, and treats it as such. It is a reality-an 
august reality; and every man who values his soul, 
and who has a sense of manhood and immortality, 
should take care how he indulges in light, casual, tri- 
fling thoughts on this subject, and give heed to such 
solemn words as those which were uttered by that hon- 



80 THE GADARENE. 

est, truth-speaking man, Paul, when he said, ' We 
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against prin- 
cipalities, against powers, against the rulers of the 
darkness of this world, against spirits of wickedness 
in heavenly places.' " 

MURDEROUS SPIRITS. 

The author of the work entitled "The Hereafter," 
relates the following: 

" During the spring of 1871, I received a number 
of letters from Morgan Reese, Esq., of Higginsville, 
Illinois, inviting me to come to that place and witness 
the manifestations in the presence of his daughters. 
Being compelled to go through Danville, Illinois, 
twelve miles south of Higginsville, in June of that 
year, I yielded to his wishes and went to the place. 
The result of that visit was written up for the 
Crucible: 

" The readers of the Crucible have already heard 
somewhat of the astonishing manifestations of this 
place, but we confess ' the half had not been told.' We 
went there very doubtful, and told them that we wanted 
them to do their best, as we wished it for the benefit 
of the public. The mediums were two daughters of 
Mr. Morgan Eeese, Ardilla and Elizabeth, and William 
Stump. We had been there but a short time when we 
heard a voice somewhere — it seemed just beyond, and 
yet it was near — a voice which sounded somewhat like 
the voice of a whip-poor-will, which we could under- 
stand with great difficulty, and yet it seemed easy for 



OBSESSIONS. 8 1 

the mediums to understand every word. The voice 
purported to come from a spirit, and threatened, 
whether in a joke or not they hardly seemed to under- 
stand, to ' draw blood.' This threat had been made so 
often, and the butcher-knife had been thrown so dan- 
gerously near the mediums, that the family, fearing 
that the spirit may be in earnest about the matter, 
have locked it up in a drawer, where they seem to think 
it is beyond his reach. In answer to our inquiries, 
the spirit said his name was John Eicheson; that he 
murdered his wife over thirty years ago, and hung 
in Covington, Indiana. He says he is in hell, 
and we had hard work to convince him that he might 
progress out of the darkness which then surrounded 
him. 

" We remained there the whole day, and talked with 
the spirit constantly. One of the mediums played on 
a jewsharp, when it seemed that a full set were out on 
the floor dancing, keeping perfect time with the music. 
All this was in broad daylight, with all the doors open, 
and the dancing might have been heard several rods 
from the house. 

" A\ T hile the spirits were talking, objects were con- 
stantly flying about the house, kitchen, and even yard — 
objects of every description, such as the hammer, a 
saucer, knives, an ear of corn, an iron bar, an ax, and 
an old chair flying across the yard, and other objects 
too numerous to mention. At one time, when objects 
were flying about the house in a most lively manner, 
a cat, which was about half way across the kitchen, 



82 the gad a ::;::•;::. 

between the room and kitchen doors, was picked up 
by an unseen band, and thrown so hard against the 
open door as to glance off into the yard, about six feet 
from the kitchen. The cat raised her tail and the hair 
on her back, and looked back, first on one side, and 
then on the other, to see who had been facilitating her 
locomotion, while the spirit and the spectators were all 
enjoying a hearty laugh over the matter (for the spirit 
often laughs when he throws objects so near as to 
frighten persons). Doubtless her feline worship 
was looking which way to run in order to evade the 
danger. 

" We returned in the evening after the lecture, when 
the room was made dark, and we never experienced 
anything so terrific in our life. While the spirit is 
repeating his threats to ' draw blood,' they are ham- 
mering away as if they would batter the house down ; 
objects are thrown all about the house, on the floor, to 
the great danger of our heads, and the severe detri- 
ment of our shins. In the midst of this din and 
confusion heavy steps are heard, a scuffling ensues, the 
mediums are calling for lights ; but before we can strike 
our matches they are thrown heavily against the side 
of the house. This was such a dread reality that it 
was with difficulty that the mediums could be per- 
suaded to allow the light extinguished again." 

NEW ZEALAND MAORIS. 

During our recent travels and labors in New Zealand 
we had frequent opportunities of learning about the 



OBSESSIONS. 83 



religious views of the semi-civilizecl Maoris, the orig- 
inal Polygamous inhabitants of this island— a people 
who have rapidly degenerated since the advent there 
of Christian missionaries. And here, as in all lands 
of our travels, were we reminded of the spiritual 
degrees of humanity, each having its abuses of gifts 
involving the obsessional influences common to all ages. 
These New Zealand Maoris believed in a plurality of 
invisible gods, and a future existence, although the 
tajpu took the place of religious observances. " They 
had priests and " sorcerers," and held intercourse with 
their "ancestral dead." They were troubled with 
demons. The heads of the chiefs were tabooed (tapu), 
no one being allowed to touch them, or hardly allude 
to them, under fearful penalties. They believed in 
charms, and" wore them. Death, to them, was the pas- 
sage to the Beinga, the unseen world, or plaee of 
departed spirits. They did not fear to die, yet pre- 
ferred living in their mortal bodies. They believed 
that individuals occupied different apartments in 
Bemga, according as their earthly lives had been good 
or ill. Messages were frecpuently given to dying per- 
sons to take to deceased relatives in this shadow-land 
of souls. All of their funeral wails over their recent 
dead ended with, "Go! go, dear one, away to thy peo- 
ple!"^ It is a singular coincidence that the Fijians, 
Tahitians, Tongans, and Samoans, as well as the New 
Zealanders, considered the place of departure of the 
spirits, on their way to the unseen world, as the 
western extremities of their islands. 



84 THE GAJDARENE. 

Relation to, and communion with, a world of spirits 
are beliefs almost if not completely universal. The 
native tribes and clans of these islands are not only 
aware of holding intercourse with the so-called dead, 
but they understand the abuse, often using their medi- 
umistic privileges for selfish ends. During their wars 
with the English, they were uniformly made acquainted 
by vision, clairvoyance, or clairaudience, with the 
movements of the British troops before action in bat- 
tle. Not a plan of Her Majesty's officers could be 
kept from them. The leading chief of the Han Hans 
was a noted medium and medicine-man. He distinctly 
said that the " spirits of the dead " guided him to his 
victories. The Maoris in the north island still own 
much territory, have their king, and hold but little 
intercourse with pakeha, the white man. 

The medium-priest in a tribe is called Tohunga. 
They meet in close apartments, and chant their songs 
till the flickering fire fades away, when the To/itinga 
goes into his ecstatic state, and the spirit controlling 
tenders council, describes his new habitation in spirit- 
life, gives the names of those w T hom he has met, and 
bears messages in return to kindred in the higher life. 

A REMARKABLE CASE, 

Mr. "W". B , residing in San Francisco, is a gen- 
tleman of thought and intelligence. He was our chief 
engineer on board the steamer Nevada, from the Sand- 
wich Islands to New Zealand. Learning of our being 
a Spiritualist, he fully unbosomed himself, giving the 



, 



OBSESSIONS. 85 

following cases of obsession in his family. This is the 
substance of his statement: 

Himself, wife and family had often heard of Spirit- 
ualism; but had never attended a lecture, a circle, or 
read a book upon the subject. Like others, they sup- 
posed it a delusion, and beneath their notice. A few 

years since, when property was rising, Mr. B 

bought a house on Green street, and moved into it. 
lie had no knowledge of the family of whom he had 
purchased, or of the previous one that had there 
resided. He had been in the house hardly four weeks 
when his daughter, a girl of thirteen years of age, while 
playing on the piano one evening, hesitated, became a 
little spasmodic, and partly leaned over upon the piano. 

Mr. B spoke to her. No reply. He spoke again; 

"Carrie! Carrie!'''' No answer. A little alarmed, he 
went to her, and could hardly lift her hands from the 
piano. They seemed cold, clammy, and adhered to 
the instrument. He took her in his arms and laid her 
upon the sofa, when she began to make the deaf and 
dumb alphabet. It surprised the parents; for, though 
they knew something of the deaf and dumb alphabet 
by seeing it talked, they could not understand what 
was said by the intelligence. Puzzled — resolved to 

keep the family secret — Mr. B procured a deaf 

and dumb alphabet, with explanations, and by the aid 
of the spirit he soon learned to talk with the control- 
ling intelligence. The daughter was totally unconscious. 
She always thought, when coming out of the trance, 
that she had fallen asleep. The parents were careful 



86 THE GADAKENE. 

not to mention spirits or Spiritualism to her, though 
they were becoming deeply interested in a subject 
which they had considered trickery and chicanery. 
Carrie continued in school, yet fell into this trance 
every evening, talking through the deaf and dumb 

alphabetic motions. Mr. B became quite an 

expert in this language, and was attached to the deaf 
and dumb spirit. 

Five weeks had now elapsed, when one evening about 
the usual time of the entrancement, she seemed going 
into the condition; but the manner, the motions, the 
appearance, were all different. At length she began 
to talk — fluently, but incoherently. It was evidently 
a different spirit. Night after night the new intelli- 
gence came, controlling the daughter. She would walk 
her about the room very familiarly, but positively 
refused to give her name. The family became quite 
spiritualistic — in private. The spirit seemed talkative 
and rather pleasant, unless crossed, when she would 

rage most fearfully. Mrs. B would reprove her, 

which only intensified her anger, and made her take a 
dislike to her. 

A few of the neighbors coming in, said, "Why, 
Carrie (the daughter) walks, talks, and acts precisely 

like Miss , who died in this house, and was such 

a bad character! She died about two years ago; was 
eighteen years old, was very rough, had an illegitimate 
child, and when angry, would rave and curse." 

Hearing of the case, the Catholics in an adjoining 
street, said "it is the devil;" and one evening brought 



OBSESSIONS. 87 

in some flasks containing holy water wherewith to 
"lay the devil." The spirit said, " Come to cast out a 
demon, have you, with holy water? I'll show you! " 
And seizing the bottle of the water smashed it into a 

thousand pieces. Mrs. B reproved her — slapped 

her hands. The spirit, sneeringly grinning, said, " slap 
away, you don't hurt me any; you only hurt your 
child." 

Mrs. Birdsall disliked the controlling spirit, and 
began, because of this influence, to take a dislike to 
Spiritualism, although she was becoming something 
of a medium herself. 

Ere long the Rev. Dr. Elliot heard of the strange 
manifestations, or demoniac control, and begged of 

Mr. B , the father, to let him come in sometime. 

Mr. B asked the spirit, who said, "What has he 

got to do with me? No, I don't want to see him." 

But the reverend gentleman was anxious to see this 
strange trance medium — a mere child. 

Einally Mr. B invited the clergyman in. 

The spirit was controlling the medium. The doctor 
said, "Carrie, do you say your prayers?" 

The intelligence said, " Speak to me ; Carrie is 
unconscious." 

" Well," said the minister, " do you say your 
prayers ? " 

" None of your business, sir. What do you want 
of me anyway?" 

The clergyman took down the Bible and began to 
read the Scriptures, when she burst out in a rage, say- 



88 THE GADAREXE. 

ing, " By what authority do you come here to read the 
Bible to me? Leave the house! " 

Mr. Elliot kept on reading, when she seized a chair 
and rushed for him ; and as he hurried down stairs she 
struck him quite severely in the back, and then started 
for the lamp, evidently designing to dash it upon his 
head, when he rushed out of doors and left. 

Mr. B , meeting the clergyman a few days after, 

asked him if he wished to see the manifestations again. 
" No, no" said he; " I believe that spirit would knife 
me were I to go there again." 

A skeptic suggested that the daughter might be 
deceiving her parents. The spirit exclaimed, " You 

are a fool! You, Mr. William L. (giving the 

full name), are a bad man ; " and then revealed his 
life, shaking her finger, saying, "I know more; I 
know all about you." The man was glad to get away. 
She would also expose others' secrets when reproved. 
To a woman she said, " Madam, I know you. You 
better not have that soldier come to your house so 
much when your husband is away. I know your whole 
history, I do." 

Mrs. B , believing Spiritualism is all diabolical, 

tried to drive that spirit away, then would coax and 
plead, but all to no purpose. Only abuse would fol- 
low the attempt — so extreme they did not dare to have 
any of the neighbors come in. 

At times the spirit controlling would cause Carrie to 
sit as in a sullen meditation, moaning in most pitiful 
tones, saying, " My child, oh my child! can't you bring 



obsessions. oy 

me my child?" Sometimes Carrie would be under 
this control all day; and toward evening the intelli- 
gence would take this child medium up in her best 
room, putting on all the jewelry she could find, and 

insist upon going to the theater. Mr. B would 

go with her, converse with her between the acts, etc. 
In the morning Carrie would know nothing of it. 

Mr. Jackson, a clairvoyant now in San Francisco, 
whom we met several times, called to see this obsessed 
girl. The spirit told him of a transaction that occurred 
about the time of his landing in the city. He never 
called again. Whenever she came out of this trance 
state, she (the girl) was hungry, and must always have 
something to eat. 

Mrs. B ■, while shopping one day, lost the dia- 
mond from her ring. It was very valuable, and she 
was feeling sad, when this spirit entranced Carrie and 
said, " / can find your ring ! " and beckoned her to 

follow her and the medium. Mrs. B did so, and 

was directed straight to the diamond, and found it 
where she had taken off her glove. 

When this spirit dressed this girl up to go out, she 
would put all the jewelry on that she could find, and 
if she could not get enough she would steal it. The 
spirit was very fond of the opera, the theater, of jew- 
elry, and gadding in the streets. The neighbors all 
said that jewelry, and theaters, and dance-houses were 
among the chief attractions of the unfortunate woman 
that lived and died there a year or two ago. 

Mr. B would sometimes start with his daugh- 



90 THE GADARENE. 

ter for the theater, and on the way this spirit would 

take control, and Mr. B could not drive nor coax 

her to leave. If he strenuously reproved or threatened 
this spirit, she would curse and swear, and throw her 
down into the streets. Several times the spirit threw 

her down into the streets, and Mr. E has had to 

take her up in his arms and carry her to an office, or 
to her home. 

The spirit always said she did not want to hurt the 
girl, but did want to torment the child's mother. 
There were spirits, she said, who owed her a grudge, 
and they said, " We can only get at her through the 
child!" 

This spirit would sometimes quite despair, saying, 
" I'm miserable here in this dark sphere, and can't get 
out of it. I feel better when I get hold of the medium. 
I was a hard case on earth, and now I mean to get my 
revenge." * * * 

Mr. B was of the opinion, as the control 

became more easy by oft repeating, that the spirit 
made some progress. Selling out and leaving that 
house, the obsession was nearly broken up by his put- 
ting his daughter under the supervision of a family of 
mediumistic and positive Spiritualists of orderly 
spheres. 

CASE OF A UNIVEESALIST MINISTER. 

Rev. B. S. Hobbs, of New York State, well known 
there for his mediumistic experiences while a Univer- 
salist clergyman, communicated a letter to the Ban- 






OBSESSIONS. 91 

ner of Light a few years before Ins departure for the 
spirit life, in which he said: 

" More than once has my speech been controlled in 
the presence of my audience, while engaged in the 
sacred service of public prayer; and by the strangest 
demonstration, I have been prevented from repeating 
the service, until at last I was compelled to use the 
Liturgy; much painful, tried experience, rendering 
extempore prayer literally impossible. More than 
once, also, have I been driven from the workshop, after 
being forced, for a time, by positive control, to leave 
the pulpit. This to me is not easy of solution. It 
seems like violence which no spirit is justified in 
inflicting on a mortal. And were it not for my own 
personal tried experience, I should not believe it even 
possible. 

" On three Sabbaths, two of them in succession, I 
have, although in a usual state of health, been pre- 
vented by that kind of control which some, termed 
'mediums,' if not others, will understand. I have 
been prevented from speaking a word for hours, and 
been otherwise thus influenced as to make the usual 
performance of my Sabbath duties literally and to me, 
after much effort and trial, clearly impossible. 

" Again, then, I am in fact, literally driven from the 
pulpit, though happily saved from a public exhibition 
before my audience, few of whom, if indeed any, are 
conversant with the manifestations termed spirit influ- 
ence on the human system." 

Mr. Hobbs used to come to our house (Junior Edit- 



92 rilE GADAKENE. 

or's), in Oswego, immediately after being released from 
the Lunatic Asylum. He said he was no more insane 
when thus in Utica, than when in our room ; but only 
under the control of different orders of spirits. The 
lower order, when obsessing him, would throw his awls 
out of his hands in his shoemaker's shop, throw the 
hammer from his hand, throw the Bible off from the 
pulpit when he was preaching, make him froth at the 
mouth, swear like a "piper," and then compose 
psalms. He would actually improvise psalms in the 
style of David's, that no one could tell from David's, 
so far as style and diction were concerned. Poor man ! 
He was open to all kinds of control. Some were good, 
and then he was beautiful; but they tore his nervous 
system all to tatters. He, of course, was unwise, but 
did the best he knew. 

This is not an isolated case. There are wrecks, shat- 
tered wrecks of sensitives known as mediums, all 
through the land. Some of these constitutionally 
unfitted for the reception of the magnetic stimulus, 
have persistently given themselves up to a sort of 
medium-mania till their nervous systems are only com- 
parable to " reeds shaken with the wind." 

DIVINATION. 

This art of discovering things secret or future by 
certain signs, reviving these days in more general use, 
was anciently practiced as a science in different sys- 
tems or methods; as, for instance, Aeromancy, 
divining by the air; Arithinancy, by means of 



obsessions. 93 



numbers; Capnomancy, by the smoke of sacrifices; 
Chiromancy, by lines on the palms of the hands; 
Hydromancy, by water; Pyromancy,bj fire; Ophio- 
Tiancy, by serpents; Necromancy, by visiting tombs; 
Brio, nancy, by arrows, etc. The so-called wizards 
ami witches divined also by the flights of birds, by 
clouds, eclipses, transits of stars, rods, lots, images, 
cups, etc. These arts were common with the ancient 
inhabitants of Palestine, Egypt, Caldea, Arabia, and 
other Oriental countries. The professors of augurs 
and soothsayings were consulted in the most ordinary 
as well as the most important occurrences of life. 
Regarded with a feeling of awe by the superstitious 
masses, these media at length instituted a religion of 
their own, with pompous and imposing ceremonies. 
Voudouism, as practiced by African tribes, and in our 
Southern country, is but a form of divination. Their 
fetish images placed # at the door of those they would 
injure or obsess, working to a charm on superstitious 
and negative people, are but the agencies of magnetiz- 
ing. A will-force exerted upon the distant parties in 
direct concentration would be more effectual. 

Dr. P. B. Randolph, who has made himself " master 
of secret arts," and whose observations and experiences 
with the Voudous of New Orleans, Long Island, and 
of foreign countries, are extensive, speaks of the magic 
power of twin rings and amulets, and avers "it is 
possible to prepare and charge certain materials so that 
they will retain the nervaura of one person and impart 
it to another, kindling up magnetic love between them, 



94 THE GADARENE. 

just as a little yeast will leaven a whole barrel of flour." 
He also says " he has known these arts to be practiced 
for purposes of lust, passion, revenge, love, and pecu- 
niary speculation, with a strange and horrible success. 
* * * But such obfuscation can easily be overcome 
by a timely resort to magnetic magic of a higher 
grade." 

Moral character having nothing to do with this 
divining system of mediumship, we could expect noth- 
ing from it but a jumble of signs and conclusions, with 
orgies and sensualities most polluting. Only the light 
of science can cull out whatever fact is here embodied. 
Only the culture of moral responsibilities in spiritual 
revealments — thus inviting the guardianship and 
inspiration of wise spirits — can render divination 
reliable and worthy of private or public trust. 

DEVELOPMENT AND DEGENERATION. 

In connection with Mr. Darwin's theory of " Devel- 
opment," Dr. Lay cock's theory of " Degeneration " 
seems to be deserving of attention and candid exam- 
ination. In a sense the two theories may be regarded 
as complimentary to each other, the same subject being 
contemplated, as it were, by the one from a synthetical 
and by the other from an analytical point of view. As 
professor of the practice of medicine and clinical med- 
icine, and lecturer on medical psychology and mental 
disease, in the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Lay cock 
speaks with some authority. Mr. Darwin has attempted 
to trace the general ascent of man through various 



OBSESSIONS. 95 

stages of the animated series. Dr. Laycock seeks to 
establish the partial descent of man once again to cer- 
tain of these stages. According to him the principle 
by which diseases, botli bodily and mental, are to be 
explained and classified, is that they are the results of 
processes by which function, structure, and organ 
change in an order the reverse of evolution. Hence it 
follows that phenomena indicative of abnormal condi- 
tions in human beings, are phenomena indicative of 
normal conditions in inferior organizations. " Thus," 
says Dr. Laycock, " in the degenerations of the blood 
of man the normal types of the blood-corpuscle of the 
lower vertebrates appear as the degenerate white cor- 
puscles of leukamia, and the abnormal production of 
uric acid as urates in certain diseases has its counter- 
part in the normal production in birds and reptiles. 
So also with other morbid products, as sugar, glucose, 
starch, tats, oxalic acid, and the like, that which is 
morbid in man is normal lower down in the scale. 
Not otherwise is the law of cerebral functional activity 
and mental qualities." 

According to this the blood, by certain habits, is 
degenerated and annualized. As the body, with all its 
organs, is the evolution of the blood, its magnetic 
sphere will be correspondingly debased and gross. As 
the physical body is correlated with the spiritual, 
it (the spiritual) will thus be tainted, or more or less 
darkened and deflected to the earthly and sensual, 
making thus a complete habitual self-pollution in 
every part. It is said that soldiers starving to death, 



96 THE GADARENE. 

lose their rationality at a certain stage, and owing to 
the condition of their blood, become ferocious as wild 
beasts. In such instances, doubtless, the spirit, fam- 
ishing, withdraws to save a greater wreck, leaving the 
earthly man but a mere irrational animal. So if the 
spirit be starved by vicious habits, a similar result 
must follow. 

Syphilis, and other diseases, are communicated by 
sexual and other methods of contact. The sexual, 
being the life- batteries, the very fountain of physical 
and mental supply, must, of course, when tainted or 
poisoned by what cannot be appropriated, or by what 
is magnetically repellant, or any way diseased, be pol- 
luted thereby in blood, and thence in the whole sphere, 
thus allying that person with sensual association as 
by force till made a wreck of health or hope. Spirits 
of like demands are in this ring, procuring their grat- 
ification by magnetic imbibation! How do we affect 
spirits then? How do they affect us? As this world 
is fundamental physically, as the base of support to 
the next, the redemption of unfortunate spirits living 
in our magnetic atmosphere depends much upon our 
habits of life. 

HELLISH ORGIES. 

One of the greatest possible evidences of magnetic 
pollution and phantasy, is a self-praise of purity and 
a claim of being honored with lofty spirits. When 
persons are so sure that no spirits inspire them but the 
good and great — such as Jesus, Plato, Washington, and 



obsessions. 97 



111 



the like — it is certain a deception lurks somewhere 
their affections. If a child spirit is our guardian 
angel, we can thus learn wisdom, for " of such is the 
kingdom of heaven.'' 

There are other phases of obsession equally demor- 
alizing. Spiritualism has had its seances ranging 
no higher than mundane psychology; pretentious 
entrancements to tickle the fancy of the curious crowd; 
tricksters by the wholesale; the psychic nausea of 
sensational banquets; a spiritual auction for legerde- 
main; a sentimental empiricism, and as frequently a 
leadership making "merchandise of the kingdom of 
heaven." Nor is this the all of a wide-spread obsession. 
There is a vice that fruits legitimately from this indis- 
criminate invite to all sorts of psychological influences 
from « the good, bad and indifferent,"— that incidental 
vice, that open gateway to the hells! 

And yet there are blinded souls who, shrinking from 
physical promiscuity, seek to satiate the morbid desires 
of their inverted mental states by magnetic promis- 
cuity, ever hankering for "pawing" mediums, and 
even non-mediums must magnetize them. This inter- 
mixing of discordant magnetic influences invites 
disorderly-inclined spirits. The results are deplorable. 
If physical promiscuity destroys the body, magnetic 
promiscuity destroys the healthy activities of the soul. 
Thus are both soul and body "cast into hell "—that 
hell of inharmony where the " worm " of remembrance 
dietli not, and the " Are " of remorse is not quenched. 
There are cases parallel in modern times with what 
9 



98 THE GADARENE. 

the Bible speaks of — a carnal intercourse with infesting 
spirits. Israel was warned lest their sons and daugh- 
ters might "go whoring after the gods" of the 
Canaanites — a habit they actually practiced, according 
to the record (Judges ii: 17). The holy angels are 
careful what spheres they touch. There is such a thing 
as spiritual adultery. Said the Nazarene: "Whoso- 
ever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath 
committed adultery already with her in his heart." 

We have heard of instances where the parties con- 
cerned, under the plea to " facilitate the magnetic 
process," sat at periodic times in a dark circle — men 
and women perfectly nude! The "manifestations" 
were, of course, of a grade exactly corresponding 
with the purpose and associations, being lewd and 
infestiously beastial. 

The beautiful art of healing by the laying-on of 
hands has also been perverted to the same business, and 
in a more horrible manner. The statements have come 
to us by parties conversant with the facts, that certain 
so-called magnetic healers have decoyed married and 
unmarried women who applied to them for this curative 
agency, and made practical their "philosophy of life," 
as they called it, healing and "developing medium- 
ship " by promiscuous sexual acts! Institutions of this 
kind have actually been established in some cities of 
America, and operated for a season, and even adver- 
tised awhile in some of the newspapers. Were we 
not acquainted with persons who have been inmates 
of such institutions, serving them in the capacity of 



OBSESSIONS. 



hem. 



healers, also testified to by those who visited th_. 
being induced by recommendations of advertised cures, 
and who revolted at the scenes there enacted, we should 
doubt the reports of their doings, scarcely believing 
that human nature could be capable of sinking to so 
immoral debasement. 

It is the opinion of those who have seen for them- 
selves, that the operators of such institutions are 
insanely obsessed on the animal plane, and of course 
are breaking down physically as well as morally. It 
may be possible, under the blinding influences of pas- 
sional magnetisms, that such persons may work their 
imaginations into a condition of sincerity, and even 
argue the legitimacy of such conduct. But let the 
sickly and putrid look of their faces settle this mat- 
ter; let the miasmatic air that fills such abodes warn 
the unwary that such is the gate of hell; let the 
soul's sorrow and shame of those who in their better 
moments reflect upon life's solemn responsibilities both 
in habit and example, be as a burning fire in such 
Gehennas of sensuality and dark obsessions. 

It requires hut little charity to consider the state- 
ment of the Independent as true, when we reflect that 
the theology on which it bases its religion is partly 
the " Patriarchical institution " which it so righteously 
condemns when patronized to-day. But let the church 
be credited if it can surpass its theology. At any 
rate, we endorse what it says respecting the infesta- 
tions of lustful alliances, and can only hope that the 
same healthful rebuke my be applied just as vigorously 



100 THE GADAKHXE. 

in the sanctuary where the Levites " pervert the ways 
of the Lord " in secret adulteries: 

" It is against the creatures who clothe an abandoned 
manhood in beastly sweetness of tender demeanor, and 
make a moral apostleship out of clever luring of female 
imaginations into dens of desire, which they misname 
tabernacles of divine love, that good men should 
invoke all detestation and scorn. Virile qualities were 
never more degraded than in the masterful licentates 
who mistake a slop of animal sentiment for a well of 
water springing up unto everlasting life, and sink in 
the bottomless bog of demoralized passion with cries 
of glory unto the rock on which their feet are planted." 

Nor is it any apology for any of us in this age of 
enlightenment to practice deception or adultery in or 
out of the church because the Hebrew Lord encouraged 
a lying spirit: 

" And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the 
Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the 
host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and 
on his left. And the Lord said, "Who shall persuade 
Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Kamoth-gilead? 
And one said on this manner, and another said on that 
manner. And there came forth a spirit, and stood 
before the Lord, and said, I will persuade him. And 
the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I 
will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth 
of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade 
him, and prevail also: go forth and do so. Now there- 
fore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the 



OBSESSIONS. 101 

mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath 
spoken evil concerning thee." — 1 Kings xxii. 

Nay, our moral obligations are more than Hebraic; 
more than Christian, which rejoiced where sin abounded 
that grace might much more abound! Zoroaster, in 
the Zend Avesta, taught what we all endorse, that 
self-abnegation is the path to paradise: "Avoid 
licentiousness, because it is one of the readiest means 
to give evil spirits power over body and soul. Strive, 
therefore, to keep pure in body and mind, and thus 
prevent the entrance of evil spirits, who are always 
trying to gain possession of man. To think evil is 
a sin." 



CHAPTEE V. 

WITCHCRAFT AND HALLUCINATION. 

A witch was an ignorant instrument in the hands 
of the demons, while a magician was their master by 
means of a science known only to the few. In the 
earlier ages of Christianity this mysterious science 
(now entitled Spiritism) flourished widely; there 
were noted schools of magic in different parts of 
Europe. The witch always remained the same poor 
and despised outcast from among her fellow-creatures; 
whilst the magician, using the same laws with better 
understanding, was a man of power, having wonderful 
control over the superstitious masses. This masculine 
prerogative was owing to man's accredited superiority 
of rights — rights of brute force! 

The intoxication of this mental hydrophobia called 
witchcraft, was often induced by artificial stimulants. 
The Thracians used to intoxicate themselves by casting 
the seeds of certain poisonous plants into a fire made 
for the purpose, around which they sat and inspired 
the narcotic fumes. Moore says that there can be no 
doubt that the incantations of witchcraft and magic 
were generally attended with the practice of burning 
herbs of a similar kind. The ancients deemed certain 
temperaments essential to the reception of the divine 
(102) 



WITCHCRAFT AND HALLUCINATION. 103 

afflatus, and the melancholic were considered the most 
suitable, especially when aggravated by rigid absti- 
nence and the use of narcotics (this exactly suits 
Swedenborg, etc.). Pliny informs us that the sooth- 
sayers were accustomed to chew roots supposed to be 
of a certain species of henbane. The Hindoos employ 
the Indian hemp for the same purpose; in St. Domingo 
the supposed prophets chew a plant called cohaba; and 
the Fetish tribes of Africa drink their poisonous liba- 
tions to spirits. In our own day we have known of 
cases where some of our would-be Spiritual speakers 
have entranced themselves by harshish and ether in 
order to be abnormal before an eager crowd of 
sensationalists in quest of a sign of spirit control! 

THE AFRICAN GAMMA. 

Superstitious people are negatives; their simple 
faith cultivates mediumship. Hence, the ruder, igno- 
rant tribes are spiritually minded, in their way, having 
close intercourse with spirits of a like grade, who nat- 
urally linger near the earth with their old associations, 
every day and night seen and heard by their prophets. 
The Camma and other African tribes aver they " hear 
ghosts speaking " — their own departed relatives — who 
say they "are tired of living in the bush" (burying 
grounds) "and want their friends to build them a little 
house by the town." This clone, the spirits enter there 
and manifest themselves in strange, yet recognizable 
ways. 

BIBLICAL WITCHCRAFT. 

Witchcraft, being a disorderly mediumship, has been 



104 THE GADAKENE. 

considered by all superstitious people the work of an 
evil genius; by many Christians, attributed to the 
devil. Hence laws and terrible penalties, and sacrifi- 
cial deaths to exterminate the witches. Here is 
exhibited the Hebrew code so malignant. It seems 
the ancient Canaanites practiced witchcraft, and it 
continued with the Israelites through all their jour- 
neyings, of which the honest " woman of Endor " is 
an example: 

" "When thou art come into the land which the Lord 
thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after 
the abominations of those nations. There shall not be 
found among you any one that maketh his son or his 
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divin- 
ation, or an observer of the times, or an enchanter, or 
a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar 
spirits, or a wizzard, or a necromancer. For all that 
do these things are an abomination unto the Lord." — 
Deuteronomy xviii: 9-12. 

" Kegard not them that have familiar spirits, neither 
seek after wizzard s, to be defiled by them: I am the 
Lord your God." — Leviticus xix: 31. 

ECCLESIASTIC PERSECUTION. 

How black is Ecclesiastic history dating from this 
Biblical law! No sooner had King James ascended 
the throne than there was issued a formal declaration 
against religious toleration. Not content with this, he 
put forth laws decidedly unjust against witchcraft and 
witches; and Parliament was so shamefully subservient 



WITCHCRAFT AND HALLUCINATION. 105 

to this monarch, that from his coming into power to 
the latter portion of the 17th century, the enormous 
number of three thousand one hundred and ninety-two 
individuals were condemned and executed in Great 
Britain alone, under the accusation of witchcraft, 
sorcery, and conjuration. 

Had the people of this time understood mental sci- 
ence, mesmerism, biology, psychological impression, 
and the laws of mediumship, those wholesale murders, 
under cover of Christianity, would never have stained 
the pages of English history. And if in our times 
these laws are not better understood, who shall guar- 
antee us exemption from a similar martyrdom? The 
times portend such a repetition of history! 

In an interesting chapter on sorcery and witchcraft, 
Lecky says: "Tens of thousands of victims perished 
by the most agonizing and protracted torments. * * * 
In almost every province of Germany, but especially 
where Ecclesiastic influence predominated, the perse- 
cution raged with fearful intensity. Seven thousand 
victims are said to have been burned at Treves. In 
France decrees were passed on the subject by the Par- 
liaments of Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Kheims, Kowen, 
Dijon, and Rennes, and they were all followed by a har- 
vest of blood. The executions which took place in 
Paris were, in the emphatic words of an old writer, 
' almost infinite.' * * * In Italy, a thousand per- 
sons were executed in a single year in the province of 
Como; and in other parts of the country the sever- 
ity of the Inquisitions at last created an absolute 



106 THE GADARENE. 

rebellion." — Rationalism in Europe, Vol. 1, pp. 
28-31. 

Nor was the persecution exclusively Catholic. In 
Luther's "Table Talk," (1538) we find this: "The 
talk falling on witches who spoil eggs, etc., Luther 
said, ' I should have no compassion on these witches; I 
would burn them.' " — p. 251. Calvin illustrated the 
same law and spirit in the burning of Servetus at the 
stake. In Protestant England and Scotland, more 
especially during the Seventeenth century, witches 
were pursued at times with an implacable fury. There 
are instances of witch-burning less than a hundred 
years ago, in Spain. " In 1773, the Divines of the 
Associated Presbytery (Scotland) passed a resolution 
declaring their faith in witchcraft, and deploring the 
growing skepticism on the subject." — Macaulay^s 
History of England, Vol. 3, p. 706. 

The New England witchcraft, that casts to this day 
a horrid light over Puritanical history, is another phase 
of Spiritualism, mostly on the obsessional plane, and 
so diabolically managed by the church as to " confound 
saints and sinners." As we look back upon the vis- 
itation of the spirits to the colonies, and note the most 
horrible abuse of their influences, by the clergy prin- 
cipally, we cannot help feeling, if there be any " devils," 
they have a long account to settle with the witch 
murderers of New England. 

MAYLAY WITCHES. 

During our travels among the Maylay tribes, we 
had frequent occasion to observe the effects of super- 



WITCHCRAFT AND HALLUCINATION. 107 

stitious ideas upon the ignorant masses, producing a 
species of witchcraft. 

In the Thirteenth century Mohammedan missiona- 
ries converted the Malays in the Straits of Malacca to 
Islamism, using persuasion instead of the sword. 
Their original religion, however, was entirely different. 
John Cameron, F. R. G. S., assures us that " such 
Malays as have embraced none of the more modern 
religions believe in some Divine Personality, corres- 
ponding to God, and a future life, where good men 
enjoy ecstatic bliss, and the wicked suffer purgatorial 
punishments." But " their religion," he adds, " is 
strangely mixed up with demonology. They believe 
that every person is attended by a good and bad angel ; 
the latter leading to sickness, danger, and sin, while 
the good angel seeks the individual's health and hap- 
piness." In their " lives, they are influenced more by 
fear than hope." They propitiate the wicked angel 
and the evil spirits. It is only at death that they ask 
the especial care of their good angel. They stand in 
no fear of the transition. Some of their ruins indicate 
a relationship theologically to the sun and " serpent 
worshipers." 

All that witchcraft amounts to is simply a mixed 
control, arising generally, first, from perverted con- 
ditions of body; and second, from the pyschic influence 
of superstitious minds, both in and out of the body. 
It frequently occurs these days. All that is wanted is 
a little light on the subject. 



108 THE GADAKENE. 

HALLUCINATIONS. 

As yet we know but little of the process of electro- 
photographing upon the brain. Thus far it is 
ascertained, however, that the images of things and 
thoughts are there retained, even when, for the time 
being, the same inay be forgotten, but afterwards, 
with years intervening, they are called up in all their 
original freshness as if real. The brain is a living 
canvas on which is limned all we have seen, heard, 
felt, thought of. " It possesses the latent power of 
adjusting in consecutive order, by the co-action of its 
organs, whatever imaging of idea is impressed upon 
it. A single sensation or emotion may give rise to 
wonderful picturings of fancy. Dreams, for instance, 
may originate in some outward physical condition. 
A person sleeping in the cold may as likely as not 
dream of freezing in a snowdrift; and if ignorant, 
may perhaps on the morrow believe that he is fated to 
die so the very next winter." 

In their simple-mindedness many have accepted all 
unseen influences and their phenomena as angel min- 
istries, and followed such promptings into the most 
idle vagaries — all in the name of Spiritualism. Fancies 
of thought, dreams, day reveries, mental abstracted- 
ness, and other involuntary flashes, of brain, produced 
as likely as not by certain habits of body, diseases, or 
spheral reflections from associations, have all been 
reckoned by credulous Spiritualists as voices from the 
spirits! With no appeal to reason or common sense 
philosophy of mind, they of course get bewildered. 



WITCHCRAFT AND HALLUCINATION. 109 

In certain states of the atmosphere, by the laws of 
refraction, the images of objects will rise up and appear 
to be real. Travelers- are often deceived thereby. We 
mirror our own inner condition. Beware how we 
follow this mirage of mental inversion. 

" Oh, fly the glimmer of those haunted plains, 
Whereon the demon of delusion reigns." 

Beware of a self-deception! The condition of the 
soul is most lamentable when, from the specious logic, 
breeding a corresponding habit, it deludes itself with 
the obsessional idea that all human impulses are orderly 
and should be obeyed as legitimate. There can be no 
lower hell to the soul than when it embosoms in its 
trust all that comes to it. Is every whim of a child 
to be indulged? Is every feeling- a practical utility? 
There are high courts within us where all emotions, 
voices, desires, prayers, hopes, aspirations, are to be 
weighed and balanced. It is madness to be deadened 
to our relations in life under pretense of an absorbed 
spirituality and superior attainment. There can be 
no worse impoverishment. To be spiritual is to be 
rational, reasonable, practical. Every sense must have 
a life intensity; every intellectual and moral force 
awakened up to the sharpest criticism to prove all 
things. 



CHAPTEK YI. 

EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 

The human mind, more readily the mediumistic, 
transfers its states to the objects it inspects, and these 
states may be induced at first by association. 

Speaking of Luther, the Christian Union says: 
" His early life among the wild mountains and in the 
mines had imbued his mind with superstitious fears 
of unseen powers; and there was little in the religious 
life of the age to counterbalance such conceptions. 
His logic never became thorough master of his imagi- 
nation; and in this light we must always estimate 
Luther. Devils, to him, were as real as human beings ; 
and his conflicts with them were genuine." 

A Greek gentleman residing on the spot once so 
venerated as the seat of divine inspiration, where the 
Pythia proved her power of foretelling events, fur- 
nishes some interesting descriptions of the place, 
together with notices of the wild region which was 
the scene of the Cumsean Sibyl's vaticinations. This 
writer says: 

" The Lake of A vermis was once the extinct crater 
of a mighty volcano, and the whole region, though now 
fertilized by its waters, bears the marks of being lire- 
scarred, and presents a most gloomy and repulsive 
(110) 



EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. Ill 

appearance. The clefts in the savage rocks abound 
with caverns exhaling mephitic vapors and bitumin- 
ous odors. It was in one of the wildest, grandest, yet 
most awe inspiring gorges of these mountains that 
the cavern existed which tradition affirms to have been 
the dwelling of the Oumsean Sibyl. The scattered 
inhabitants of the surrounding district believed that 
this gloomy grotto was the entrance to the nether 
world; that the hammers of the Titans, working in the 
mighty laboratories of the Plutonic realms, might be 
heard, ever and anon, reverberating through the thick 
and sullen air. The dark waters of the gloomy lake 
were supposed to communicate directly with the silent 
flow of the river of death, the Lethean stream, made 
dreadful by the apparitions of unblest spirits who 
floated from the Avernian shores to the realms of 
eternal night and torture. Here dwelt the famous 
Cumrean Sibyl, and from the exhalations of those poi- 
sonous regions, fatal to the birds that attempted to 
wing their way through its burdened airs, or the living 
creatures that strayed amidst its savage wilds, this 
weird woman derived that fierce ecstasy in which she 
wrote and raved of the destiny of nations, the fate of 
armies, the downfall of kingdoms, and the decay of 
dynasties." 

There can be no doubt but that the awe of such sol- 
itudes was one of the causes of the Pythia's gloomy 
descriptions of the spiritual scenery printed psycho- 
logically upon her brain, and that such descriptions, 
accepted as valid by the Grecian devotees without ques- 



112 THE GADAEEKE. 

tioning analysis, gave to the civilizations of those times 
their wierd and mysterious characteristics, so forbid- 
ding to us tamer philosophers of the Nineteenth 
century. 

Plow important it is that our media should be 
enlightened in mental science, and be protectingly 
guarded against positive magnetic depredations, and 
surrounded by the most favorable associations and 
influences, in order to obtain the most natural and 
happy impressions of spirit entities. The truest and 
most reliable communications come through well-bal- 
anced minds, toned by pure habits to close reasoning, 
but disciplined also to receptive or negative polarity. 
Such attract corresponding grades of mind in both 
worlds, till what we receive so is burnished up with 
high thought. As in olden times there were " Schools 
of the Prophets," so should we have departments in our 
new systems of education for the development and spir- 
itual keeping of mediumship; for the best methods of 
communication, that they may be fortified against all 
encroachment upon their rights or consecration to their 
work. 

A LICENTIOUS MEDIUM. 

Epes Sargent, in his admirable work entitled 
"Peculiar," relates an incident of mediumistic life, 
perfectly illustrative of this law, wherein is portrayed 
the facility with which a negative mind is swayed by 
its surroundings. Peek, in quest of his stolen wife 
(during the last days of slavery in the late Rebellion) 



EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 113 

applies to J. Bender, consulting medium. Bender is 
a j T oung man, dirty, shabby, intemperate, licentious. 

"How is business, Mr. Bender?" asked Peek. 

"Yery slim just now," said Bender. '"This war 
fills people's minds. Can I do anything for you 
to-day?" 

"Yes. You remember the young woman at the 
house I took you to the other day — the one whose name 
you said was Clara? " 

" I remember. She paid me handsomely. Much 
obliged to you for taking me. Will you have a sip of 
Bourbon ? " 

" No, thank you ; I don't believe in anything stronger 
than water. I want to know if you can tell me where 
in the city that young lady is." 

Bender put down his cigar, clasped his hands, laid 
them on the table, and closed his eyes. In a minute 
his whole face seemed transfigured. A certain sensual 
expression it had worn was displaced by one of rapt 
and tender interest. The lids of his eyes hung loosely 
over the uprolled balls. He looked five years younger. 
He sighed several times heavily, moved his lips and 
throat as if laboring to speak, and then seemed 
absorbed as if witnessing unspeakable things. He 
remained thus four or five minutes, and then put out 
his hands and placed them on one of Peek's. 

"Ah! this is a good hand," said the young seer; " I 
like the feel of it. I wish his would speak as well of 
him." 

" Of whom do you mean? " 
10 



114 THE GADARENE. 

" Of this one whose hands are on yours. Ah ! he 
is weak, and you are strong. He knows the right, but 
he will not do the right. He knows there is a heaven, 
and yet he walks hellward." 

" Can we not save him? " asked Peek. 

" No. His own bitter experience must be his tutor." 

"Why will he try to deceive?" asked Peek; "to 
deceive sometimes, even in these manifestations of his 
wonderful gift? " 

" You see it is the very condition of that gift that 
he should be impressible to influences, whether good or 
bad. He takes his color from the society which 
encamps around him. Sometimes, as now, the good 
ones come, and then so bitterly he bewails his faults. 
Sometimes the bad get full possession of him, and he 
is what they will — a drunkard, a liar, a thief, a scoffer. 
Yes, I have known him to scoff at those great facts 
which make spirit existence to him a certainty." 

" Can I help him in any way? Will money aid him 
to throw off the bad influences?" 

" No. Poor as he is, he has too much money. He 
does not know the true uses of it. He must learn 
them through suffering. Leave him to the discipline 
of the earth-life. You know what that is. How 
much you must have passed through. How sad, 
and yet how brave and cheerful you have been ! It 
all comes to me as I press the palm of your hand. Ah! 
you have sought her so long and earnestly! and you 
cannot find her! and you think she is faithful to you 
s.ill!" 






EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 115 

" Yes, and neither mortal nor spirit can make me 
think otherwise. But tell me where I shall look for 
her." 

The young man lifted the black hand to his white 
forehead and pressed the palm there for a moment, and 
then, with a sigh, laid it gently on the table and said: 
" It is of no use. I get confused impressions — noth- 
ing clear or forcible. Why have you not consulted 
me before about your wife?" 

" Because, first, I wished to leave it to you to find 
out what I wanted; and this you have done at last. 
Secondly, I did not think I could trust you, or rather 
the intelligence that might speak through you. But 
you have been more candid than I expected. You have 
not pretended, as you often do, to more knowledge 
than you really possess." 

" The reason is that I am now admitted into a state 
where I can look down on myself as from a higher 
plane; so that I feel like a different being from myself, 
and must distinguish between me as I now am, and hi/m 
as he usually is." [What a solemn truth is here! what a 
contemplation for a spirit to see itself mirrored in a 
medium — darkly when that medium is surrounded by 
evil influences — light and beautiful when surrounded 
by the good !] 

" Do you know what is truly the hell of evil doers? 
It is to see themselves as they are, and God as he is. 
These tame preachers rave about hell-fire and lakes of 
sulphur. What poor, feeble, halting imaginations 
thev have! Better beds of brimstone than a couch of 



116 THE GADARENE. 

down on which one lies seeing what one might have 
been, but is not — than seeing what he is." 

[The medium then gave Peek a slight cine to his 
wife, which, when followed out, in due time led to her 
discovery. The spirit requested him to pay Bender 
two dollars only, " not a cent more."] 

The clairvoyant sighed heavily, and leaning his 
elbows on the table, covered his face with his hands. 
He remained in this posture for nearly a minute. 
Suddenly he dropped his hands, shook himself, and 
started up. His eyes were open. He stared wildly 
about, then seemed to slip back into his old self. The 
former unctious, villainous expression returned to his 
face. He looked around for his half-smoked cigar, 
which he took up and re-lighted. Peek drew two 
dollars from a purse, and offered them to him. 

" I reckon you can afford more than that," said Mr. 
Bender. 

" That is your regular fee," replied Peek; " I haven't 
been here half an hour." 

" Oh, well, we won't dispute about it," said the 
medium, thrusting the rags into a pocket of his vest. 

THE GAMBLER'S DEN. 

The following incident of actual occurrence illus- 
trates the power of magnetic influences upon our 
media, and the necessity of keeping the physical sys- 
tem in a state of health, and the mind well balanced 
with hopeful feelings, aspirations, and happy associa- 
tions, as sure guards against temptation. It shows, 



EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 117 

too, the cunning of obsessing spirits in times of need 
and peril, like the one who came to Jesus in the wil- 
derness, suggesting that he make use of his spiritual 
gifts in administering to his physical needs, even 
though his parental angels had promised protection 
through all his ministry. 

Whilst lecturing in an Eastern city, the gentleman 
medium of whom we speak became acquainted with a 
young man who was proud, spiritual, poor, and disposed 
to learn. Seeing him attired in clothes scarcely decent 
to appear in meeting, he said: 

"Would to God that I had the means to put that 
young man in a position to rise in the world. The 
now departed of other years helped me; I must help 
others. It is blessed to give. But my family must 
have my first attention." 

Then the spirit whispered: 

"Does not humanity constitute one family?" 

Giving the worthy young man some valuable books 
suited to his needs, he bade him good cheer with words 
of sympathy. Soon after, returning in a steamer from 
a distant city where he lectured, a friend met him in a 
street. The poor fellow was pale and dejected. 

" Why, brother, where have you been," he asked, 
" that you look so haggard and woe-begone? Are you 
sick?" 

" No," was the reply, "not sick, but I had no sleep 
la-;' night on board a crowded steamer." 

"Reduced so much in one night? why, you droop 
like wilted grass. Did you not get well paid? " 



118 THE GADAKENE. 

" Got enough to cover expenses to and from. Why 
are you so inquisitive?" 

At length it was wormed out of him — the history 
of that wild night on the crowded steamer. To no 
mortal had he lisped it, but " seeing you will know all 
about me," he added, " and will never betray my con- 
fidence, I must out with it. I have been in a gambling 
saloon! " 

Strange as it may seem, there is an angel's hand in 
all this, and the moral is very beautiful. 

On board the steamer were ajbout thirteen hundred 
passengers; not a stateroom, nor berth, nor chair, could 
be procured. He therefore wandered round from place 
to place — a time when one is attracted by every trivial 
incident, a time of negation — and unconsciously 
went down into the lower cabin, when he heard 
voices laughing and shouting at one end of the boat. 
Elbowing his way through the motley crowd, a looker 
on, he at length found a band of gamblers seated round 
a table, one man using the cards with his confederates, 
who assumed to be his enemies and opposers, engaged 
in betting, each of whom put down a hundred dollars. 
The medium noticed a black spot on a certain card, 
and said to his nearest neighbor: 

" They can see the mark on that card ; don't fool 
away your money so! " 

Turning round to him with an appearance of feeling 
insulted, the gambler said, with a design of provoking 
an adventure: 

" I know my own business, sir. I don't care a 
damn — got my pocket full of rocks." 



EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 119 

Then a fine-dressed gentleman stepped up to him 
with the air of an indifferent adviser, and suggestively 
said : 

" Suppose you put down a hundred dollars; you will 
get it. I have won four hundred dollars to-night; as 
long as the money is going, you might as well have 
some of it as myself. Put down a hundred dollars.'' 

"Why, I never gambled in my life," said he, quite 
dreamily. 

'"Tis n't gambling — only put money in the pocket 
and say nothing. Why, you have a beautiful cross 
(taking it patronizingly in his fingers), you can give 
your money to some benevolent institution — some 
orphan asylum — and do good by it — come! " 

The bait was alluring. At that moment the thought 
of that young man flashed on his mind in hopeful 
vision. 

" Yes, I can get him a suit of clothes and make 
him happy. I will do good with the money which 
these gamblers otherwise will use in debauchery." 

Whilst he thus was cogitating, as oblivious to him- 
self as a star in a midnight cloud, a long-nosed Jew 
said loudly to a gambler: 

"Don't put down any more; you are an old fool! 
you will lose all you have." 

To which the gambler retorted, " Damn you, go 
away. I know my business." 

This answer had the desired effect. 

" The young man in Boston! Oh, can 1 not help 
him? " said he in silent re very. Then he hesitated — ■ 
" is this not gambling? Oh, the poor young man! " 



120 THE GADARENE. 

He was exhausted, had nothing to eat, negative, psy- 
chologized, obsessed, bewildered, entranced by spirits 
on a low plane, wrapped in their subtle influence till 
almost unconscious. 

The well-dressed gentleman, noticing the mental 
vibration, pursued his advantage: 

" These devils, whose life I detest, will spend their 
money in drink; you will do good with it." 

And our medium thought then how many he could 
thus bless. The temptation gained, the tempter gloated, 
the decision was made — "I'll doit!" was his secret 
resolution. 

As he took out his money his conscience smote to 
the quick, and whispered, " Beware of gambling! " 
but sympathy for that young man triumphed. " I will 
snatch the money from these demons; why, they all 
make money; I'll get — and — do — good!" and planked 
down a hundred dollar bill! Another man covered it 
with a hundred dollars. Three cards lay side by side 
as before, and one of these the lucky spotted card that 
won every time, when the chief gambler said: 

" Sir, which will you have? " 

The medium put his hand on the spotted card; the 
man turned it over — it was not the card! 

" You've lost," said the arch gambler, with a busi- 
ness-like coolness; " who planks next? " 

The well-dressed gentleman, as if consoling the 
medium, touched his arm, saying, "Try it again; you 
will win the next time; I'll go you halves." 

He immediately left the place, and passed up to the 



EFFECTS OF ASSOCIATIONS. 121 

upper cabin and breathed a purer air, when he felt 
a different inspiration, followed by remorse, and 
exclaimed aloud, " Who can tell who are friends? What 
is life? O God, save me! O angels, come to me!" 

" Who are friends? " softly said a spirit guide, " what 
is life? O, my brother, my brother! " 

Then he was folded in calm reflection, as if a hand 
of safety held his, and a holy impression, never to 
be forgotten, rested on his mind, the dark cloud now 
transfiguring him : 

" You have learned a lesson at a dear cost; you can 
speak of gambling as never before. You will never 
be off your guard again with such company. Y T ou 
perceive that when you enter a certain state of magnet- 
ism you can be influenced by spirits of a corresponding 
character. Never be negative with such associates. 
Watch! go forth! you are wiser — gird on the sword 
of reform again — wiser and better! " 

" It never pays to wreck the health 
In drudging after gain, 
And he is sold who thinks that gold 
Is cheaply bought with pain. 

The good and pure alone are sure 

To bring prolonged success, 
While what is right in Heaven's sight 

Is always sure to bless." 

11 



CHAPTEE YII 

PSYCHOLOGY OF SENTIMENT AND HABIT. 

Among the primal causes of obsession is the incul- 
cation of low and groveling sentiment. If, as has been 
shown, every letter we write, every article of clothing 
we wear, and, in fact, everything we touch, contains 
the psychological imprint of our personal magnetism, 
how much more potent must be the thought or idea 
of subtle mind from its brainial battery, directly 
impressing mere negatives who reverence such teach- 
ers as heaven-appointed oracles! Popes, priests, and 
ministers of every sect have been held in esteem for 
their religious office; and when these improve their 
opportunity to retain social power, how easy it is to 
mold the moral and spiritual character of the masses ! 
Were these sustaining a natural and inspirational 
relation with the masses, instructing them in the 
laws of their being rather than book knowledge, ever 
with a view to progressive improvement in every 
possible manner, what an incalculable amount of good 
could they accomplish! But the facts are potent that, 
as a general rule, they build their churches upon mere 
theory, organize their sects upon fossilized dogmas, 
and are therefore ancient in make-up of character, with 
magnetic forces of the same grade, chained and chain- 
(122) 



PSYCHOLOGY. 123 

ing, dead and deadening, " blind leaders of the blind/' 
even in the great blaze of scientific light burning all 
around them. Sentiment is a molder of mind, and if 
unnatural and dismal, it drags down to its own plane 
of horrors whatever it can grasp. Like begets like; 
this is a law of life in all its multiform uses. The the- 
ology of a personal devil, of an implacable deity, of 
a bloody atonement to appease his wrath and satisfy 
divine justice, and of a hell of endless torments, being 
dark and frightful ideals, and appealing only to low 
considerations, have produced negative states of moral 
character, inductive to infestuous influences from cor- 
responding associations, both in the human and spirit 
worlds. By these theological implements have the 
priests transformed our naturally beautiful world into 
Hadean serfdoms, debased the religious nature of man, 
and perverted the passions to exhale a moral malaria 
from the earth to the immortal spheres. A depraved 
idea of our humanity is the very mother of sin itself. 

A few quotations from some theological authors will 
suffice to show how damning must have been the moral 
influences of such sentiments still lingering in the 
shadows of a night that is slowly paling into morning 
of a brighter clay: 

" Every sin, both original and eternal, being a trans- 
gression of the righteous law of God, and contrary 
thereunto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the 
sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God, 
and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, 
with miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal." — 
Westminster Confession. 



124 THE GADAKENE. 

Rev. Thomas Boston, in his " Four-fold State," 
informs us that: 

" The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the 
judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. 
The godly husband shall say amen! to the damnation 
of her who lay in his bosom ! The godly parent shall 
say halleluiah! at the passing of the sentence of their 
ungodly child. And the godly child shall from the 
heart approve the damnation of his wicked parents 
who begot him, and the mother who bore him." — 
p. 336. 

Calvin, speaking of the mortal condition of infants, 
and the effects of hereditary depravity, employs the 
following language: 

" It is hereditary depravity and corruption of our 
nature, diffused through all parts of the soul, which 
in the first place, exposes us to the wrath of God," 
etc. (Institutes ii: 1-8.) Of infants, he says: "They 
bring their condemnation with them from their 
mother's womb, being liable to punishment not 
for the sins of another, but for their own. For, 
although they have not yet produced the fruits of their 
iniquity, yet they have the seed enclosed in themselves; 
nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed of sin; 
therefore it cannot but be odious and abominable to 
God. Whence it follows that it (the infant's corrupt 
nature) is properly considered sin before God, because 
there could not be liability to punishment without 
sin." — Institutes ii : 1-8. 

Calvin, in his Theological Tracts, addresses Sebas- 



PSYCHOLOGY. 125 

tian Castalio, for teaching that all laws, human and 
divine, condemn a man after and because of trans- 
gression, in the following words: 

" You deny that it is just in God to damn any one, 
unless on account of transgression. Persons innumer- 
able are taken out of life while yet infants. Put forth 
now your virulence against God who precipitates into 
eternal death harmless infants, {innoxious foetus) torn 
from their mothers' 1 breasts. He who will not detest 
this blasphemy [of yours] when it is only exposed, 
may curse me at his will. For it cannot be demanded 
that I should be safe and free from the abuse of those 
who do not spare God." — Tract Theology. — ColumnicB 
Nebulonis, etc., Art. 14. 

Parson Wiggleworth, we think it was, a New 
England clergyman, taught this: 
" Have faith the same 

With endless shame 

For all the human race, 

For Hell is crammed 

With infants, damned 

Without a day of grace." 

In the " Practical Sermons " of Edwards, occurs 
this passage: 

" The saints in glory will be far more sensible how 
dreadful the wrath of God is, and will better under- 
stand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are, 
yet this will be no occasion of grief to them, but 
rejoicing. They will not be sorry for the damned ; it 
will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them, but 
on the contrary, when they see this sight, it will 



126 THE GADARENE. 

occasion rejoicing, and excite them to joyful praises." 
"Watts, in his hymns, further dilates upon the subject: 

" A point of time, a moment's space, 
Removes me to that heavenly place, 
Or stmts me up in hell." 
" But vengeance and damnation lies 
On rebels who refuse the grace ; 
Who God's Eternal Son despise, 
The hottest hell shall be their place." 

These gems of Evangelism were formerly sung in 
churches, and termed " making melody in the heart 
to God." 

The Rev. Thomas Vincent, a Calvanistic clergyman 
of the Seventeenth century, indulges in the following 
strain : 

"This will fill them (the saints) with astonishing 
admiration and wondering joy, when they see some 
of their near relatives going to hell ; their fathers, their 
mothers, their children, their husbands, their wives, 
their intimate friends and companions, while they 
themselves are saved! * * * Those affections they 
now have for relatives out of Christ will cease; and 
they will not have the least trouble to see them sen- 
tenced to hell, and thrust into the fiery furnace!'''' 

The American Reform Tract and Book Society, of 
Cincinnati, published a few years since the following 
from the Rev. James Smith: 

" The fire of hell is such that multitudes of tears 
will not quench it, and length of time will not burn it 
out. ' The wrath of God abideth ' on the rejecter of 
Christ." (John in: 36.) 



PSYCHOLOGY. 1 27 

"Oh, eternity! eternity! Who can fathom it? Mar- 
iners have their plummet to measure the depths of the 
sea; but what line or plummet shall we use to fathom 
the depth of eternity ? The breath of the Lord kin- 
dles the flames of the pit (Isaiah xxx: 33), and where 
shall we find waters to quench those flames? Oh, 
Eternity! If all the body of the earth and the sea 
were turned to sand, and all the space up to the starry 
heaven were nothing but sand, and if a little bird 
should come once every thousand years and take away 
in her bill but a single grain from all that heap of 
sand, what numberless years and ages must be spent 
before the whole of that vast quantity would be car- 
ried away. Yet if even at the end of all that time the 
sinner might come out of hell, there would be some 
hope. But that word Forever breaks the heart. 
1 The smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever 
and ever.' " 

Nothing is plainer in psychological law than that 
selfish and dismal sentiment generates fear in the 
mind of the recipient, and this in turn a negative con- 
dition of moral character on the animal plane, so 
transporting the hells of theology to our fair world. 
The social ruin of all this cannot abate until more nat- 
ural and happy views of life and duty are mutually 
entertained by the inhabitants of both worlds. 

We would not detract one iota from the virtue of a 
single individual, and would ever reckon in the balances 
of justice the age in which live the representatives of 
religious thought, and so be large in credit of charity; 



128 THE GADAKENE. 

but we cannot sincerely apologize for the dogmas they 
inculcated when the better part of human nature 
revolts with disgust and horror, more especially so 
with the educated. Bitter must be the weeping of the 
clergy who, in the spirit life, discover their doctrines 
have peopled it with dark and debased specimens of 
citizens there, here molded in falsehoods. The greater 
the culpability to preserve these debasing dogmas in 
this age of scientific light, when every sensible mind 
scorns them as irrational and licentious in their effects 
both upon this world and the next. We once conversed 
with a dark, unhappy spirit, through Mr. Burns, of 
Coldwater, Michigan — a reliable man. On inquiry we 
learned the spirit had in earth-life preached the doc- 
trine of the atonement, a personal devil, and an endless 
hell. He averred with sorrowful regret that such 
teaching had cast him into outer darkness. 

THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE. 

The thinkers and reformers were looking for a 
" church departure," but to the world's staggering dis- 
appointment, the Evangelical Alliance, held in New 
York, October, 1873, represented by Protestants, 
has again planted itself squarely on the old basis, 
rebuilding and patching up the same theological peni- 
tentiary. Here is the platform: 

1. The divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency 
of the Holy Scriptures. 

2. Right and duty of private judgment in their 
interpretation. 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



129 



3. The Unity and Trinity of the Godhead. 

4. The utter depravity of human nature in con- 
sequence of the fall. 

5. Justification by faith. 

6. The influence of the Holy Spirit 

7. The immortality of the soul. 

8. The resurrection of the body. 

9. The final judgment. 

10. The divine institution of the Christian ministry. 
Seers see in this perpetuation of dismal dogmas and 

priestly power, drifting steadily to a union of church 
and state, a dark hour for American liberty, over 
which angels are prophetically weeping. 

"With what loathing do the city people shun the 
water in the tanks and sewers. All the scum of the 
town flows in there — the overflowings of filthy cellars, 
the soakings of the stables, the drainage of blocks in 
every direction. The inhabitants know it is full of 
pestilence and deadness; so, far off they go to the 
mountain streams of liquid crystal. They bridge an 
aqueduct thither, and draw it thence over vales, under 
hills, and through the forests, into the thirsty city, 
where it branches off into thousands of little pipes — 
a refreshing unity in diversity — and leaps up with 
laughter in the public walks, bedewing the gardens, 
washing the streets, rejoicing the blameless beasts, 
purifying and blessing every house, and thousands are 
glad as the Hebrews when Moses smote the rock of 
Horeb. How long shall we drink of the slough of 
ages \ " The whole head is faint, and the whole heart 



130 THE GADARENE. 

sick." Is there no escape from sectarian prisons, whose 
air is dead and poisonous, to the mountains of free 
thought? Oh, the panting and thirsting! In the deserts 
of popular theology souls are perishing! The prom- 
ised oasis of the fashionable church is but the delusive 
mirage of sin! Let us hasten to the Carmels and Oli- 
vets of inspiration, and find the many flowing waters 
of the river of life. 

CONFOUNDING- OF VIRTUE AND VICE. 

The responsibility of stoical moralists of to-day is 
even greater than that of the clergy, when, under a 
superior light, they make chaos of virtue and vice, and 
so blind the negative people with seductive meta- 
physics, forcing their own intellects to veil their own 
follies under seeming reason. 

" It is possible," said Paracelsus, " that my spirit, 
without the help of the body, and through a fiery will 
alone, can wound others. It is also possible that I can 
bring the spirit of my adversary into an image, and 
then double him up to his displeasure. Will is a great 
point in the art of medicine. Man can hang disease 
on man and beast through curses. * * * Every 
imagination of man proceeds from the centre of his 
being. This is the sun of the microcosm; and out of 
the microcosm flows the imagination into the great 
world. Thus the imagination of man is a seed which 
becomes materialized into the outer. * * * The 
imagination of another may be able to kill me. Imag- 
ination springing out of pleasure and desire usually 



PSYCHOLOGY. 131 

acts in concert with the will power; therefore envy and 
hatred follow; for desire is followed by the deed. No 
armor protects against magical influences, for they 
injure the inward spirit of life." 

The heart speaks though the lips belie; and true it 
is, « He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap 
corruption." 

Against such applies the apostolic injunction: "For 
we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against 
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the 
darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness 
[wicked spirits] in high plaees."— Ephesicms vi: 12. 

To point out errors in the social fabric without sub- 
stituting something better; to mingle so much vinegar 
with the milk of philanthropy as to make it utterly 
distasteful to the multitude, is, to say the most, but 
slightly benefiting humanity. The "waster should 
be the builder, too," says Whittier, and Carlyle insists 
that reformers should go forth with " hammers for 
building, as well as torches for burning." Deeply 
interested in every genuine reform of 'the age, in 
everything that benefits and spiritualizes the great 
brotherhood of races, the voices of Spiritualists should 
ever go forth, " Repent, repent ye, for the kingdom of 
heaven is at hand." And is it not an hour for retrench- 
ment? A magnetic gluttony, and then a starvation, is 
poor economy. A great sensation, and then a " burnt 
district," is a chaotic policy. The words of the Naza- 
rene are applicable to us at this stage of our growth, 
when all around obsessing influences madden and fever 



132 THE GADARENE. 

even to the spirit world: "Behold, I give you power 
to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the 
power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means 
hurt you. Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not, that 
the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice 
because your names are written in heaven." 

Joel Tiffany, who was and is a Spiritualist as well 
as a logician and moral philosopher, says: " There are 
those who have lost their higher aspirations; who have 
ceased to make the proper distinctions between virtue 
and vice, between the pure and the impure impulses 
of the soul; who have become, and are becoming, vic- 
tims of a sensual philosophy. * * * No man will 
ever defend or excuse the practice of any vice or crime 
from an inward approbation; nor will he seek to lessen 
the estimated difference between virtue and vice, jus- 
tice or crime, unless he wishes to take advantage 
thereof. The intemperate drinker seeks to justify 
drinking; the libertine apologizes for sensuality; and 



L 5 

we hear any one judging favorably of any practice, we 
are justified in judging him by his judgment. * * * 
This kind of Spiritualism has led its advocates gener- 
ally to fall into the too common error of trying to 
redeem the world without first redeeming themselves. 
" It has revealed the faults of others, but not their 
own. They have seen the mote in their neighbor's 
eye, but not the beam in their own. They tell of the 
redemptive power of such Spiritualism, while they 
remain unredeemed by it. If its influence upon the 



- 



PSYCHOLOGY. 133 

world to overcome selfishness, appetite, passion, and 
lust shall be no greater than it has been upon them- 
selves, the world will not be redeemed; the millenium 
will be postponed until the coming of some other 
Messiah." 

We also commend to their contemplation the wise 
saying of Buddha: " The three poisons, covetousness, 
anger and delusion, which rage within the heart, and 
the five obscurities, envy, passion, sloth, vaccillation 
and unbelief, which embrace it, effectually prevent one 
from obtaining supreme reason. But once get rid of 
the pollution of the heart, and then we perceive the 
spiritual portions of ourselves, which we have had 
from the first, although involved in the net of life and 
death; gladly, then, we mount the paradise of all the 
Bhoods, where reason and virtue continually abide." 
And of Zoroaster: "Every man who is pure in 
thought, words, and actions, will go to the. celestial 
regions. Every man who is evil in thought, word, or 
actions, will go to a place of punishment." And of 
the Nazarene: " By thy words thou shalt be justified, 
and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." 

WHAT SHALL WE DO TO BE SAVED? 

Says Dr. K. T. Trail: " No truth in philosophy is 
better established than the fact that bodily purity and 
true morality hold intimate and reciprocal relations. 
Try if you can, reader, to entertain the idea of a glut- 
tonous eater, a wine-bibber, or a tobacco-user, in 
connection with holiness of heart. There is something 



134 THE GADARENE. 

unnatural, revolting, repulsive, in the association. 
Just as the bodily appetences and the outward senses 
are depraved, does the inner man, the moral nature, 
become gross. The pure spirit will not, cannot, dwell 
in a filthy tenement. There is a natural correspond- 
ence between material and spiritual things, so that the 
quality of one denotes the character of the other." 

Measure another court of your customary sin. 
Only one page of to-day's horrors — only a small per- 
centage of child-murdering come to light; but a true 
registry is kept — the " book of life " contains fearful 
records over which angels weep. Look with clairvoyant 
eyes into the rivers, and lakes, and sewers, and privies, 
and scan the partially developed forms, rotting to skele- 
tons, of hundreds of infants. Others are consumed 
in fires, devoured by starving city dogs, or buried 
secretly under midnight darkness, uncoffined and 
unknelled. 

Oh, fathers! forcing women to this awful crime by 
social oppressions to earn a living by prostitution — 
prostitution of your own wives and daughters, too — - 
what is that blot upon your soul, whereon not a 
repentant tear has yet fallen? Read, read the ominous 
blot — murder! Alas, where shall we turn, whence 
shall we fly, to find integrity? Who can lift up his 
hands and say, " God, I thank thee, I am not as other 
men are?" Who, perceiving there is no virtue where 
lust has cast but a single stain upon the heart, or 
foeticide has engraved its dreaded brand of " mur- 
derer " upon the memory, can refrain from smiting 



PSYCHOLOGY. 135 

his breast in deep sorrow, saying, " God be merciful 
to me a sinner? " 

What of the children who, despite poisonous drugs, 
escape death in the foetus, whose fathers, shamed and 
confused at the mishap of conception, demand abortion 
to secure speedier opportunities for married adultery; 
whose mothers, recoiling before the sorrows of child- 
birth and the prospects of newly added cares at home, 
despairingly resolve upon abortion, thus stamping 
forever upon the coining child the intent of suicide — 
what of such children? Are they healthy, orderly, 
spiritual, beautiful, happy? Sad truth! the world is 
peopling with unwelcome children! children with 
dwarfed and idiotic spiritualities, discordant affections, 
brutalized passions, sinking humanity lower and lower 
to a plane of demoniac incarnation. 

Notice the effect of this murdering of the innocents 
upon the mothers. Behold their pale, sallow faces, 
their hectic cheeks, their feeble step, their soul-sorrow, 
secretly kept but plainly visible in every lineament of 
the countenance, revealing as on a dial plate the sad 
workings of the heart. Are they fallen — fallen ? If 
the babe escapes the attempt at abortion, the mother 
loves it — loves the babe of accident — weeps bitterly 
if a little grave hides it from sight. Thus sacred is 
human nature, even when poisoned at the fountains of 
life! Does not all this prove how easy is human 
regeneration, and how divine will be our homes under 
the law of a wisely directed love? 

Abortion, like the death angel of Egypt, sprinkles 



136 THE GADARENE. 

blood upon the lintels of nearly every house. Even 
when love is pure and not a passion is unholy, many a 
married pair, whose wisdom as yet demands no child, 
falls a prey to the scourge. They mean no harm. It 
was an accident; but does nature credit for the acci- 
dent? Will the world know it? Heaven knows it, 
trembling victim of the serpent! 

Is conscience undisturbed? Ask the* wife's pale lips, 
the genital weakness, the alarm of the loving husband. 
Their love may be constant; nearer may they cling to 
each other, as wounded birds in one nest, as if mutual 
sympathy might palliate for this outrage upon nature. 
How many degrees does the dial of life discount? Ask 
the gravestones that say with silent tenderness, as if 
the very marble would weep — aged twenty! aged 
twenty-five! aged thirty! Oh, they are young wives! 
All such concussions of body jar not only the spiritual 
organism, but tremble out upon the magnetic atmos- 
phere, there picturing murder, seen and felt in spirit 
life. 

CONCEPTCVE IMMORTALITY. 

To the dark and frightful picture of our sensual life 
we would add another figure, central in it, for all men 
and women to stare at, that the responsibilities of pas- 
sional excesses and obsessional pollutions reach on to the 
coming world ! Conception is immortal life in embryo. 
All the murdered buds will yet be laid at our feet! 
The awful consequences of these acts will be realized 
in spirit agony as they were in the physical, when 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



137 



nature was so outraged ! We would fain hide from 
the picture, but cannot; it stares us in the face every- 
where. Great God! whose justice never sleeps — 
angels! whose hearts are " touched with the feeling of 
our infirmity," is there no reprieve, no deliverance 
from this " abomination of desolation " in our social 
life? Fathers and mothers! young men and maidens! 
what is the handwriting of heaven, traced in blood ? 
" Repent! repent! by adaptable relations of life with 
chastity of habits. 

SOOT AT, DISPARITIES. 

If the central love of two persons are on diverse 
spheral planes, the one spiritual and the other sensual, 
they instinctively repel. Either the spiritual must 
descend to the sensual, and there be buried, or else 
the sensual must ascend to the spiritual regenerated, 
ere there can be harmony between the two. Just here 
lies the secret of our social troubles. The spiritual 
influx from the angel world has blossomed out some 
souls as flowers in summer; the organically spiritual 
have responded and passed to a higher plane of life. 
These love more, love deeper, love purer, as angels do, 
and hence require more spiritual magnetism to supply 
the soul. Having thus eaten, so to speak, of the tree 
of life in Eden, to descend to a merely animal life, to 
live for self, to gratify the " lusts of the flesh," is the 
starvation and damnation of hell. Either the sensual 
mate must be regenerated and spiritualized, or disso- 
lution of soul-copartnership must ensue. "What 
12 



lOO TJIE G ADARENE. 

concord hath Christ with Belial? " The animal plane, 
when nnguided by celestial wisdom, preys npon its 
victim — is pleased most when the sweet and beautiful 
of heaven becomes the servant of its lust. To descend 
here, after the soul " has passed from this death unto 
life," is an unpardonable sin. The voice of the angel 
is, "Come up hither!" Come where every faculty 
and function is no longer a dead Golgotha, but a mount 
of transfiguration, where all loves are free, natural 
and holy. 

CORRELATION OF PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES. 

Principles are primal springs of being, the esse of 
things. Laws are but their modes of action. Forms 
are results of both — the crystals of spirit, the life 
mirror that reflects the unseen to the seen. In 
principles are laid our individuality, expressing an 
identity by embodiment ever recognizable. Life 
chemistries call it out. It seems to have been the aim 
of the Infinite through various mediations, and such 
experiences as life-epics, lyrics, tragedies and comedies, 
substances and shadows, pointed thorns and radiant 
rose-leaves, to educate or help each mortal to become 
self-poised and harmonial. The most perfect figure is 
a sphere, each part being equally distant from the 
centre; and still every sphere is an individuality, 
though neither angular nor irregular. So in the divine 
symmetry of the angel, no one faculty or quality puts 
out, obtaining undue position or action over the others, 
for each has its place, function and mission with refer- 



PSYCHOLOGY. 139 

ence to the whole. Thus angels and archangels, crowned 
with wisdom and love, are poised and counterpoised, 
excelling in all things. 

If a man's ruling love is lust of appetite, it takes 
form in a putrid face, bleared eyes, calloused brain, 
gotteral voice, and a beastly organism generally. If 
it is lust for wealth, his every faculty and sense, his 
mouth, eye, ear, nose, lip, beard, step, gesture, are so 
many ; ' stocks in trade." If it is for literature, he has 
an intellectual head, intellectual manners, intellectual 
coat, intellectual boots, intellectual starch in his very 
collar. By this law of love we are molded, as the 
potter molds the clay. 

Nor is there a chance for deception before the 
inspecting angels. " They know at once the whole 
man, perceiving by the tone of his voice the affection 
that reigns in his thought; and by his behavior or 
form of action the love that rules in his will. They 
have a clear perception of such things, however a man 
may strive to conceal his true character under an 
appearance of religion and morality." 

The spirit is ever building its own house, beautiful 
or deformed, as its instinct is, both here and hereafter. 
No doubt there are modifying forces at work to pre- 
vent a true expression. Outward circumstances check 
our best effort. The common misfortunes of life 
sometimes limn the face and form into ugly visages. 
But remember such transfiguring influences must work 
first upon the spirit where all causation lies, changing 
there its nature to organize a corresponding physical 



140 THE GADAKENE. 

contour. Surroundings are secondary in the molding 
of life and character. They may retard or impede the 
process of structure; yet the spirit is the ever-busy 
artist, carving for itself from the best material it can 
get to make for itself a " suitable habitation and a 
name." As spiritual beings we are transformed into 
the likeness of those virtues for which we have an 
admiration. 

"There is no sculpture like the mind," says the 
Phrenological Journal. " The man who thinks, reads, 
meditates aright, has intelligence in his features, 
stamped on his brow, and gleaming in his eye. There 
is nothing that so refines and ennobles face and mein 
as the constant presence of great thoughts, a high 
determination, a virtuous principle, an unquenchable 
enthusiasm. But more powerful still than any of 
these, as a beautifier of the person, is the overmaster- 
ing purpose and pervading disposition of impartial 
kindness in the heart, a universal benevolence, and 
desire to make others happy. The soul that is full of 
pure and generous atfections, fashions the features into 
its own angelic likeness, as the rose, by inherent 
impulse, grows in grace and blossoms into a loveliness 
which art cannot equal." 






CHAPTEE VIII. 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 



The power of exorcising ; or casting out evil spirits, 
varies according to educational notions and creedal 
practices. The Catholic Church, from time immemo- 
rial, basing its authority upon Apostolic custom, has 
made use of consecrated water sprinkled upon the 
obsessed, and certain established rites and prayers, 
with the sign of the cross. Similar magical enchant- 
ments were used, particularly by St. Gregory the 
Great, St. Epiphanius, St. Jerome, St. Hilarion, 
Theodoret, Palladius, and others. 

In La Messenger, of Leige, for October, 1873 
(translated by G. L. Ditson, M. D., for the Banner of 
Light), is the following, speaking of Layard's discov- 
eries at Xineveh: "This primitive Spiritualism had 
a recognized existence (in Assyria); a considerable 
portion of the religious rites of the people of this 
country consisted of invocations, and above all, of 
sacred words, to chase away evil spirits, to whom were 
attributed a large part of human ills. One published 
tablet contained a series of prayers or of sacramental 
words, serving to preserve a woman enciente and the 
nurse from evils that come to afflict. * * * The 
words used in the middle ages by the exorcists, ' Va- 
(141) 



14:2 THE GADARENE. 

t-en, va-t-en, mauvais, rnauvais,'' are purely and simply 
a reproduction textuelle of the words pronounced by 
the magi of the Chaldeans four to six thousand years 
ago: Xilka, xilka, besa, besa. These Assyrian words, 
transmitted from generation to generation, have always 
been regarded as having a mysterious and sovereign 
power to shield one from the spirit of the ' clouds,' or 
of ' darkness.' " 

Exorcists are intellectually positive. As to the mere 
method of casting out, moral qualities are not essen- 
tial. But it does so depend where the subject is to be 
magnetically insulated against a return of the same or 
similar obsessions. An immoral man with a powerful 
will can drive out a spirit; but the mental battery of 
the subject is only thus changed for a new class of 
obsessing influences, perhaps more entangling than 
before. The Nazarene, knowing this fact, thus 
describes the magnetic exchange from one obsession 
to another, showing the absolute necessity of moral 
ability to produce a thorough dispossession: "When 
the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh 
through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he 
saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. 
And when he cometh, he flndeth it swept and gar- 
nished. Then goeth he, and taketh with him seven 
other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter 
in and dwell there; and the last state of that man is 
worse than the first." 

BOY RECLAIMED FROM AN EVIL SPIRIT. 

In the life of Apollonius, of Tyana, by Philostra- 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 143 

tus, we have this singular account: " In the midst of a 
conversation between Apollonius and some wise men, 
a messenger arrived, introducing to these sages some 
people from India. Among them was a woman who 
came to intercede for her son, a youth of about sixteen 
years of age, who for the last two years was possessed 
of a lying, wicked demon. One of the sages asked on 
what grounds she said this. ' Because,' replied she, 
'a demon has fallen in love with him for his beauty, 
who suffers him not to enjoy any freedom of will, nor 
go to school, nor shoot his bow, nor even stay at home, 
but drags him abroad into lonely and desert places. 
Besides,' said she, 'he no longer retains his natural 
voice, but speaks like a man, and sees objects with eyes 
very different from his own. This is the cause why I 
weep and tear my bosom, and endeavor all I can to 
have him restored to his right mind; but alas! he 
knows me not. At the same time, I must tell you that 
when once I made up my mind to come to you, which 
is now more than a year, the demon confessed by the 
mouth of my boy as his interpreter, who he is. He 
avowed himself to be the ghost of a man who had 
fallen long ago in battle, and who had been extremely 
fond of his wife; but that when he understood she had 
violated Ids marriage bed, and wedded another man 
only three days after his death, his love fur the sex 
turned to hatred, and all his affections passed to this 
boy. At last the demon promised, on the condition 
of my making no complaint to you, that he would do 
my son much good. 1 suffered myself to be tempted 



144 THE GADARENE. 

by his promises; but he has now long deceived me, 
and has got possession of my house, which he keeps 
without one sentiment of truth or honor.' Here one 
of the sages asked if the boy was at hand. His mother 
said he was not, for the demon did all he could to 
prevent his coming; for precipices dire, and death 
itself were held out by way of threats should I bring 
him before your tribunal. ' Take courage, woman,' 
said the wise man, 'for as soon as he has read this 
letter he will harm you not; ' and with these words he 
took one from his bosom and gave it to the woman, 
which was written to the spectre, containing many 
things, enough not only to alarm, but terrify him. 
And he left." 

CURANTA SIMILIBUS INSANITIES. 

Apollonius, possessing great power even over the 
animal creation, on his way through Tarsus found a 
man who had been bitten thirty days before by a mad 
dog, and who was then running on all fours, barking 
and howling. Having obtained a description of the 
dog, he said, looking forth clairvoyantly: "He is 
now standing near the fountain, wishing to drink. Go 
bring him hither; you have only to say that I want 
him." He then went on to explain the law of curanta 
simiUhus, and cited the case of Telephus, who was 
cured by the spear that wounded him. "When the 
dog was brought he patted him, and induced him to 
lick the place where he had been bitten ; whereupon 
the young man was restored to his right mind." 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 145 

Says Rev. William R Alger, in a lecture: "The 
fundamental phenomena of insanity are equally 
exhibited in delirium tremens, the exaltations and 
hallucinations of fevers, also in persons under the 
influence of opium or hashish; but in these exhibi- 
tions the force of the phenomena is brief, the 
termination is foreseen, and the cause is understood; 
therefore the mystic horror and dread are wanting! 
And yet insanity itself, in its worst phases, is not any 
more a diabolical chaos than the phenomena mani- 
fested under these other conditions; it is equally with 
the various departments and experiences of sanity and 
health, under the domain of law, following regular 
sequences of cause and effect, having a beginning and 
end appropriate to itself, and running through its nor- 
mal course, which is generally understood by those 
who are experts in the matter. It is all covered with 
the lines of order and law — the symmetrical and sys- 
tematic regularity and harmony which is the leading 
characteristic of all the workings of God in Nature." 
The curative agencies vary according to conditions; 
and chief among them, as the constantly working 
force, is psychic pathology, with the appliances of 
neatness, order, purity, amusement, and physiological 
regularity. As yet the psychological is the least 
employed, being the least understood as a remedial 
agent. 

Dr. John A. Weise, quoting from a work of Dr. 
Grath Wilkinson, on "A Proposal to Treat Lunacy by 
Spiritualism," says: « Lunacy is essentially a mental 
13 



146 THE GADAKENE. 

derangement. Why is it not logical to infer that the 
mental anra has attracted and harbors correspondingly 
affinitive spirits, whose sport the lunatic becomes? In 
our historical survey we have seen that all nations 
believed in and acted upon this doctrine; that the 
wisest and best of our race entertained this belief in 
some form or other. Religions, creeds, sects, theories 
and opinions are based upon it. Modern Spiritualism 
is trying to prove it by induction, and put it on a 
scientific and practical basis." 

About A. D. 300, the treatment of lunacy is 
mentioned in the sanitary laws enacted at Eome. 
According to Posidonius, nervous and mental diseases 
are owing to the disturbance of the spirit or soul 
organs. Demons, talismans and exorcism were used 
to cure them. 

"The Essseans, a certain order of learned Jews in 
Egypt, imbued with Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, Jewish 
and Christian ideas, taught that all diseases, especially 
insanity, could be cured through the influence of a 
contemplative life, and the agency of angels." 

Professor Ferrier, of England, experimenting on the 
brains of animals by electricity, and thereby producing 
astonishing effects, was led to apply the electrodes on 
the various organs of the human brain by an exterior 
manipulation, and was enabled to materially change 
the character of the people who came to him as 
patients. Says a London correspondent: "His power 
is especially marked in cases of depraved alimentive- 
ness — especially in dipsomania, the alcoholic thirst. 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 147 

By the application of electricity to that portion of the 
brain which comprehends the alimentive faculties, and 
attends to eating and drinking, the diseased longing is 
made to cease; and, by a course of continued applica- 
tion the drunkard's depraved appetite is not only cured, 
but he acquires an intense aversion to all kinds of 
alcoholic stimulus. People of extreme irritability, of 
great combativeness and destrnctiveness are soothed 
by the application of electricity, so that the irritability 
disappears and they become amiable and agreeable 
companions. Women who are scolds, and men who 
are fierce and brutal in temperament; persons who are 
afflicted with melancholia, or excessive caution, or 
extreme nervousness, are all susceptible of cure under 
these strange methods. 

" But the most surprising effect of electricity upon 
the brain is in regard to sleep. As physiologists are 
aware, no part of the human system sleeps except the 
brain. During our nightly repose the blood circulates, 
the stomach digests, the liver and kidneys secrete their 
humors, and all the functions of the body continue in 
operation — not so actively, perhaps, as when we are 
awake, but certainly with very little perceptible differ- 
ence. The only part of the human economy, then, in 
which any change appears to be effected in sleep is the 
brain and nervous system, which, in their normal con- 
dition, require varying periods of repose. But the 
professor, according to his friends, has discovered that 
the time of sleep may be reduced to a minimum ; that 
one or two hours will be amply sufficient hereafter 



148 THE GADAEENE. 

when this system has been applied to the human race, 
and that this enormous gain can be made without 
affecting the integrity of the nervous system or limiting 
the duration of life." 

Evidently here is a magnetic law of cure, practical 
in curing obsessed insanities. It is the opinion of the 
most eminent psychologists that three-quarters of the 
insane are obsessed, and, as experiments in various 
ways demonstrate, that the same force which depolar- 
ized their brainial action by unadaptable magnetism, 
can be successfully used in cure. This has been done in 
isolated cases, and why not on a more extensive scale 
in our asylums? Nothing is more important for 
superintendents and physicians to investigate. A his- 
torian tells us that a wild boy found in the forest of 
Aiden, in 1563, "saved the sheep from devouring 
wolves by rubbing his spittle on them. He had been 
brought up by a she wolf" 

The ancient Egyptians adopted a psychical method 
of cure, worthy of our imitation. "At both extremi- 
ties of Egypt were temples dedicated to Saturn, to 
which melancholies and obsessed persons resorted in 
great numbers. In these abodes, surrounded by shady 
groves and beautiful gardens, varieties of games and 
recreations were established for the amusement of the 
mind and the invigoration of the body, while the 
imagination was impressed with the finest productions 
of the sculptor and painter. * * * Music, love, 
employment, exercising the memory, and fixing the 
attention, were also among the remedies." 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 149 

Pythagoras and Asclepiades introduced a similar 
cure in Greece. 

CHRISTIAN EXORCISM. 

Justin Martyr, in his Apology, declares that the 
Christians of his time " healed in every part of the 
world, and dispossessed evil spirits " in the name of 
Jesus. 

Tertulian, himself obsessed, taught the doctrine of 
evil influences, as well as good. The inspiration that 
moved him was most ferocious. He enjoined the most 
malignant treatment against the rival media of 
unchristian sects. 

Apollinaris, a Kavennian Bishop of note, accompa- 
nying the Apostle Peter to Pome, and preaching on 
the eastern coast of Italy, is said to have silenced the 
oracles of Eoman temples, and "caused deceiving 
spirits to depart therefrom." Having a masterly psy- 
chological power, he " cast out demons and converted 
vast multitudes to the principles of Jesus." Other 
Christian fathers, and among them Origen, believed 
that by prayer and reading of sacred writings " demons 
could be cast out and numberless evils averted." 

"Theological opinion has nowhere undergone such 
strange mutations as in New England. There Unita- 
rianism acquired its firmest seat, and there Spiritualism 
has won its chief triumphs. A curious instance of 
the action of these two heresies (shall we say ?) is before 
us in an article entitled ' The Perfection of Jesus,' in 
Old and New, a Boston monthly magazine, written 



150 THE GADARENE. 

by the Rev. J. F. Clarke, a distinguished Unitarian 
preacher. ' As regards Demoniacal Possession,' writes 
Mr. Clarke, ' I think that Jesus believed in it, and that 
he spoke to the evil spirits as though they would hear 
him. A few years ago I thought that he shared a 
popular error in this, which our century had outgrown. 
But within a few years I have been led to believe in 
the reality of Demoniacal Possession. I have myself 
known personally, or by credible testimony, of at least 
half a dozen instances of persons who, after having 
allowed themselves to become spiritual mediums, seem 
at last to have been taken possession of by a low and 
unclean order of spirits. And the best way of rescuing 
them, when they were too far gone to help themselves, 
was to have some other person possessing greater spir- 
itual force to do what Jesus did, namely, order the 
spirit to go away. I believe that in certain places and 
periods the nervous condition of men is such that the 
lower order of ghosts may get control over them, and 
that when Jesus came, it was just such a time and 
place as this.' " — J\ew Londoner. 

SUPERSTITIOUS METHODS. 

People, in their superstitions, try to cast out by the 
Bible, or in the name of Jesus Christ. Negative 
spirits so educated, may yield; but the method is a 
farce. In the name of Mahomet, or wise Apollonius, 
is just as available if the magnetic will is equally 
potent. The name to conjure by is an old whim of 
the church. Again, people fancy they can guard 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDEE. 151 

against evil influences — forgetful that this is a sign 
the magnet so drawing is in themselves — by hugging 
the Bible, rigid discipline, and cold formalities. A 
worse form of obsession cannot be conceived. The 
subterfuge, being a superstition, engenders fear, and 
fear brings the torment of magnetic furies. "When we 
shall have broken the damning charm of superstition, 
positive in science and character, lifted up in moral 
sense of rectitude, all devils will depart swiftly as 
" Legion " into the herd of swine. 

HAUNTED HOUSES. 

The evidences are too numerous these days to doubt 
the reality of haunted houses. They have occurred in 
various places all over the country, unmistakably par- 
alleled by ancient experience. The hallowed quiet of 
some houses proves the presence of happy angels. 

Longfellow has breathed the spiritual conception in 
the following: 

" All houses wherein men have lived and died 
Are haunted houses. Thro' the open doors 
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, 
"With feet that make no sound upon the floors. 

" We meet them at the doorway, on the stair ; 
Along the passages they come and go, 
Impalpable impressions on the air, 
A sense of something moving to and fro." 

In haunted houses voices are often heard, and other 
noises. In instances of this kind it has been found, 
generally, the spirits so controlling are not happy. 
They may be magnetically chained there by some act 



152 THE GADARENE. 

of injustice or murder there committed, making the 
very walls and furniture of the house a polarized 
magnet to operate by. 

Among the many items of value in Mrs. Hardinge's 
" Spiritualism in America," is the following testimony 
from a spirit who averred that he was compelled to 
haunt a certain house: "The strongest part of my 
earthly magnetism had been poured out in that place; 
that crime was strong passion; strong passion ever 
liberated strong magnetism; and that human magnet- 
ism formed ' tractors,' or magnetic points, which drew 
the spiritual body to themselves, and bound it as 
forcibly as chains forged in the magnetism of the 
universe." 

The true way to educe order is to organize a candid 
circle with a reliable medium; hold a conversation 
with the spirit or spirits, ascertain what is needed, 
give wise counsel, and by repeated efforts persuade 
into a more harmonious life. This has been repeatedly 
done with perfect success. 

The most positive magnetic force in a circle rules. 
How easy to furnish a preponderance of psychological 
thought from the earth plane, and infuse it into the 
brain of an honest medium as a genuine communica- 
tion! This deception has occurred a thousand times, 
leading the unwary into difficulty, if the illusion be 
followed. This accounts largely for the unreliability 
of many communications, and shows the moral neces- 
sity of a better adjustment of the magnetic forces on 
the part of the inquiring parties, that the spirits may 
be the positive battery. 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 153 

One can see also that it is a very easy matter for a 
mischievous spirit in the interest of inquiring parties, 
when they are positive in magnetic control, to work 
for their interest with wonderful facility. To get at 
the real merits of such cases, and learn the wishes of 
the departed, disinterested parties should be employed 
to form and conduct the circle, and receive the 
communication. 

During our (Senior Editor's) lecture travels, by in- 
vitation we attended a spiritual circle in a filthy and 
disorderly house. The moment the medium was con- 
trolled we detected the plane of his obsession. After 
positive argument and persuasion he consented to leave, 
averring there was no place for him in the world but 
that, being shunned by every spirit. We convinced 
him that his control would ruin the medium and do 
him (the spirit) also an injury; and that his social 
odor arose from his soul affections, which, when 
changed by enlightenment and reform, would win him 
friends and happiness. He, in departing, thanked us 
with a resolution to improve. The medium was then 
influenced by another wiser spirit, who averred that 
the one we had cast out had lived on earth a vagabond 
life, and was attracted there by the magnetism ot 
the house, where he had palmed himself off as a 
distinguished character! 

TRANSFIGURATIONS. 

When Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration, 
the magnetic cloud there gathered from that circle of 



154 THE GADAEEJSTE. 

spirits and mediums, became an avenue of articulation, 
if we may so credit the testimony. Undoubtedly 
there is a truth here. The combined sphere of the 
circle and whatever belonged to it in association of 
interest, was organically materialized into vocal expres- 
sions of the spirit's idea. The same law as to vision 
is illustrated by Mrs. Conant, medium for the Banner 
of Light: 

" Certain mediumistic persons who emit from their 
bodies a superabundance of magnetic and electric aura 
may be called telescopes through which the disem- 
bodied spirit can look and behold material objects — 
those objects which are as clearly shut out from its 
vision as are the objects by which it is surrounded shut 
out from yourselves." 

Materialization of a spiritual body comes under the 
same head. Allan Kardec, speaking of this law, thus 
lucidly sets forth certain statements, which we venture 
to be demonstrable in occult science: 

" A spirit can, in certain cases, cause it [p/risprit 
or spiritual body] to undergo a species of molecular 
modification which renders it visible and tangible to 
us; it is thus that apparitions areproduced, a phenom- 
enon not, in reality, more extraordinary than that of 
steam, which is invisible when highly rarified, and 
becomes visible when condensed. * * * It is by 
means of its pe'risprit that a spirit acts on and through 
its body while living in the material world; it is by 
means of this same lluidic intermediary that it mani- 
fests itself after the death of the body, by acting on 



SET THINK HOUSE IJSI OKDEE. 155 

the inert substances of the material world, producing 
noises, and the movements of tables, and other objects 
which it raises, upsets, or carries away. These phe- 
nomena should not be deemed surprising, seeing that, 
even in our sphere, the most powerful motors are 
precisely those most rarified fluids to which we give 
the name of ' imponderables,' as air, steam, and electric- 
ity. It is also with the aid of its jpirisjprit that a 
spirit causes the medium to write, to draw, to speak, 
etc. Having no longer a tangible body of its own 
through which to manifest itself ostensibly, it makes 
use of the organs of the medium, which it uses as 
though they were its own, with the aid of the currents 
of fluidic effluvia which it brings to bear upon him. 
It is through the actions of these fluidic currents that 
a spirit moves a table, or causes it to indicate the let- 
ters composing the message it wishes to convey. 
"When it raises a table, causing it to float, without 
visible support, in the air, the spirit does not lift it 
with arms, but surrounds and penetrates it with a sort 
of fluidic atmosphere that neutralizes the action of 
gravitation, exactly as is done by the air in the case 
of balloons and kites; the fluid with which it is thus 
saturated gives it, momentarily, agreater specific levity. 
When a spirit causes a table to adhere to the floor, as 
though nailed to it, the effect is produced by a process 
analogous to that by which we produce a vacuum with 
the aid of the air-pump. When a table moves about 
the room, the spirit does not move, but merely impels 
it on its course by directing upon it the action of the 



156 THE GADAKENE. 

jets of fluid tliat keep it going. "When a spirit causes 
raps in a table, in walls, in other bodies, or in the air, 
it does not cause them by a blow, but merely directs 
u])on the spot where the rap is heard a jet of fluid 
that produces the effect of an electric shock. It mod- 
ifies the sound thus produced, as we modify the sounds 
produced by the air." 

Anna Blackwell thus speaks of spirit pictures: 
" Those among the people of the fluidic world who are 
pretty well advanced in the study of substances and 
forces, are able to produce from those substances, 
through their skill in directing the action of the form- 
ative and qualitative forces, a far greater variety of 
objects, and of a far higher character, than we can 
produce in the material sphere; and can also impart to 
them a variety of qualities — among others that of 
vitality — which renders their labors interesting and 
amusing to a degree of which we can form but a very 
faint idea. 

" ' I must leave you now,' said a spirit, one day, to 
a friend of the writer, ' I am busy making a picture, 
and I want to get on with it.' 

" 'A picture! ' exclaimed my friend, ' I had no idea 
that spirits could paint pictures, or would care to do 
anything of the kind! ' 

" ' I said ' a picture,' because I can find no better way 
of conveying to you something like an idea of what I 
am making; but it is not at all like what you call a 
picture in your world, nor do I paint as you paint pic- 
tures upon the earth. I work with fluids ; and what I 



SET THINE HOUSE IN OEDER. 157 

make is real and living. I vitalize my flowers, and 
niy animals, and the thousand things I make, so that 
they are all alive, though not living as such things 
live in your world; for there is no spirit in them, and 
they have, therefore, no consciousness, and will only 
last a short time. Not long ago, in order to receive 
some friends who were coming to visit me, I made a 
beautiful arbor, covered with flowers, and full of mag- 
nificent singing birds, and it was all living, but only 
for the short time for which I wanted it. When my 
friends were gone, I let it melt away again. Those 
who are more advanced than I am can produce almost 
any forms or scenery they please, and can make them 
last longer; but all these things melt away after a 
time. We never care to keep them long; we should 
get tired of them. We let them dissolve, and make 
others. You cannot imagine how charming these cre- 
ations are, and how much pleasure we take in them 
when we are not busy with more serious things.' 
Spirits say that these fluidic creations are not mere 
amusements, but that by means of these exercises 
they gradually learn the properties of substances and 
of forces, and thus become competent to take part in 
the direction of the true spirit creations of the material 
spheres which constitute so important a branch of the 
occupations of the higher orders of disincarnate 
intelligences." 

EFFECTS OF BIGOTRY. 

Obsessed persons of different Christian faiths are 
often kept in a state of prejudice against Spiritualism 



158 THE GADARENE. 

and its heavenly ministries by designing and selfish 
spirits on purpose to prevent their emancipation from 
their control. We are acquainted with a Universalist 
of this stamp, who, being morally negative and animal 
in all his ideas and habits, is perfectly obsessed in every 
part of his being by low-minded spirits, lest the light 
will hurt them. Sir Thomas Brown, in his " Eeligio 
Medici," conveys similar ideas: 

" Those that, to confute their incredulity, desire to 
see apparitions, shall questionless never behold any. 
The devil hath them already in a heresy as capital, as 
witchcraft, and to appear to them were but to convert 
them." 

Obsessional influences are sometimes removed by 
change of locality. The subjects then come under 
new magnetisms, which, if not overcome by the con- 
trolling spirits, may entirely neutralize the first 
obsession. Certain localities and houses are more sus- 
ceptible of spirit influx than others, as with some 
mineralized mountains and caves, or dwellings long 
accustomed to the same quality of mediumship. 

John Morrison adverts to the fact that when the 
Scottish mediums change from one country to another, 
thus coming into new magnetic associations, " their 
gift is often lost to them." 

AN ORTHODOX SPIRIT. 

Having heard of the case, we solicited the following. 
It shows, as in thousands of like conditions, the 
necessity for a stern and positive action of will — 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 159 

something that will even shock the unnatural propri- 
eties of the obsessed, in order to accomplish a return 
to common sense: 

" Milwaukee, November 18, 1873. 

"Brother Barrett: I will now try and redeem the 
promise I made you long ago, to give a brief history 
of one of the many cases of spirit obsession that have 
come under my professional care. 

" Mrs. P was a lady of very quiet, unpretending 

nature, not physically well, but able to attend to the 
ordinary household cares. She was brought up under 
orthodox influences; was a church-goer, but not mem- 
ber; and the neighborhood in which she lived was 
thoroughly orthodox. At one of their evening parties 
they tried to see what amusement they could get out 
of planchette, and, after experimenting, they found it 
wrote readily under her hands in response to questions 
asked. Soon it astonished them by writing communi- 
cations and signing names of parties who were long 
since dead. Finally it wrote, ' Take the pencil in your 
hand,' which she did. Her hand was controlled to 
write different communications. Some of the friends 
were interested; but many of them, among whom was 
her husband, were bitterly opposed to her writing, 
while she was much interested. Thus a very inhar- 
monious atmosphere was the result, and she stopped 
sitting. 

" One day shortly after, she was entranced and lay 
for some time in an unconscious condition, in spite 
of all their efforts to restore her. All at once she 



160 THE GADARENE. 

raised her hands, clasped them, exclaiming, ' I am 
saved! I am saved! mother has been here, and tells 
me Spiritualism is all false; have nothing to do with 
it; cling to the Bible and Jesus ! ' After which she 
was so possessed by the belief that she was in direct 
communion with God, that every impression she 
received she thought was from Him, and was sure she 
should shortly die. She ate but little, would allow no 
fire in the room, although the coldest winter weather, 
and the windows must be open. In this condition, 
days followed days, and weeks succeeded weeks; still 
she was no better, but growing thin in flesh ; had her 
Bible in her hands constantly, and was not at ease 
unless some one was engaged in prayer. Different 
physicians were consulted, but they could not agree as 
to her disease, some calling it softening of the brain, 
others insanity; and arrangements were in progress to 
take her to the Insane Asylum. 

"The minister of the church she attended visited her, 
prayed with her, and finally pronounced her converted ! 
Time wore on, and the family being worried out with 
sleepless nights and witnessing her distressed condi- 
tion, sent for me. When I saw her she looked more 
like a corpse than a living woman. As I came to her 
bedside she looked up, saying, 'It is no use, doctor; 
God and Jesus tell me I have got to die.' I replied, 
' I am more than a match for your God and the devil 
both ; you can't die if I am here.' And I joked her, 
laughed, and kept up such a constant sally that she 
soon became mirthful. In the mean time I kept my 



SET THINE HOUSE IN OEDEK. 161 

will active to get possession of her, and dispossess the 
controlling spirit. Gradually I succeeded, until I had 
her just as thoroughly under my psychological control 
as she had been under the other's, and I assure you at 
this time she thought far less of the Bible and pray- 
ing ' for Christ's sake.' After having her thus under my 
influence, I told her why she had felt as she had ; told 
her she was possessed by an ignorant, orthodox spirit, 
who was killing her, not by intent, but through self- 
ishness; and that she must try and resist the influence. 
She kept in this quiet, rational frame of mind for some 
time after I left, but finally the orthodox control 
again took her, and before it could be permanently 
overcome she had to be removed from the house and 
entire surroundings. After getting away entirely 
from the magnetic sphere she had been in, she was 
restored, and different spirits came and influenced her, 
and she is now a good test medium. 

" If this should meet her eye, she will please excuse 
me for thus putting her case before the public for the 
sake of the lessons that may be culled therefrom, 
which are: 

"First — That irregular and disorderly control gen- 
arally comes to those who are not posted in spiritual 
laws, and opposing elements being brought to bear 
upon the sensitive. 

"Second — That there are those, in spirit life as well 

as here, who do not believe in spirit communion, and 

are opposed thereto; and that knowledge of spirit life 

and the laws relating to spiritual existence are the 

14 



162 THE GADARENE. 

only means of safety, and that harmonious surround 
ings are necessary to all sensitives during the stage of 
developing into an acting medium. Ignorance is the 
source of all the trouble in this direction, causing 
untold suffering, often resulting in permanent insanity; 
and that knowledge of, and a regard for, all the laws 
of our being, both spiritual and physical, is our only 
savior. Juliet H. Severance, M. D." 

INTEMPERATE SPIRITS. 

Judge Edmonds — perhaps no man in the ranks of 
Spiritualists has had experiences so diverse and deep 
as this gentleman, now an ascended seer and min- 
istering angel. Re embraced Spiritualism on its 
birth-morn in this country, and for more than a score 
of years has been a critical investigator and able 
defender of it in its phenomenal and philosophical 
aspects. Studying law in the office of President Yan- 
Buren, practicing in the courts, counseling in impor- 
tant cases, revising the statute laws of New York, 
occupying a high judicial position seventeen years, 
accustoming himself to the sifting of evidence all this 
time, prepared him for the study of Spiritualism in 
all its psychological ramifications. Serving as Circuit 
Judge for several years, he was further honored with 
a seat upon the Bench of the Supreme Court. While 
occupying this distinguished position he was spirit- 
itually gifted with clairvoyance and clairaudience. 
The great " clemency " which he was sometimes 
charged with showing to criminals was owing to his 
clairvoyant and spiritual perceptions of the causes 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDKR. 103 

that led to misfortunes and crimes. Evidently many 
criminals are led into their dark deeds by spirits peo- 
pling the lower spheres. This, though modifying, 
does not abrogate moral responsibility. 

The Judge has recently expressed the opinion that 
many of the so-called lunatics in asylums are only 
under the influence of spirits. " Some fifteen cases of 
insanity, or rather obsession," says the Judge, " I have 
been instrumental in curing. This I said to the 
Academy of Science, in New York." 

During a recent visit to New York the Judge, 
then in earth form, related to us this incident, in 
substance as here described. Well does it illustrate 
the law already defined, that mental conditions alike 
attract, sometimes producing unintentional and uncon- 
scious obsession: 

"A professional gentleman of the city, engaged in 
the law, and an exemplary Christian, walking, as he 
believed, in the fear of God, of a sudden became irri- 
table, cross in his family, inclined to swear, and what 
was more strange to himself, he at times thirsted for 
liquor. He became daily more and more a puzzle to 
himself. Though a temperance man all his life, he 
could hardly get by a dram-shop without going in, and 
though ever cautious in language, he could hardly 
keep at times from swearing outrageously; and then 
he was tempted in other directions not necessary to 
name. At times he felt suspicious, selfish, and utterly 
unlike himself every way. His family observed how 
strange he acted, and then he became magnetically 



164 THE GADARENE. 

nervous and angered at the least provocation, so unlike 
his previous calm, upright and moral life." 

Finally he felt inclined to consult Judge Edmonds. 
Calling upon him, and commencing to relate his con- 
dition in a round-about way, the Judge said: "You 
tell me no more; I know all about it. A spirit came 
into the room with you — a spirit who is the cause, 
unknown to you, of all your troubles." 

"What spirit?" inquired this attorney. 

" He does not give me his name," replied the Judge, 
" but has been relating his history. It seems from his 
appearance and what he says, that he was an ignorant 
and positive, a selfish and worldly man, who went to 
California in the gold, fever days. He lived on the 
lower plane of California mining life. In the mines 
he died. He tells me that he remained about the 
mines sometime — remained or lingered in the dark. 
He was neither happy nor very miserable. He seemed, 
to be pretty much alone, and yet he was conscious of 
other and better beings about him, who did not come 
to him. Dissatisfied with his locality and condition, 
he resolved to go back East — to New York — and 
about the first one he saw, or saw clearly enough to 
come into sympathetic relations with, was you." 

"What did he come to me for," asked this Christian 
attorney, shuddering at the thought. " What sym- 
pathy could there be? " 

"He says," replied the Judge, "you were suffering 
with the same physical disease that he died with, and 
your dissatisfaction and mental irritability, caused by 
the physical disease attracted him to you." 



SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDEK. 165 

"But what do you stay with me for," asked the 
lawyer. 

"Because I like to," was the spirit's reply. 

"Why do you like to?" 

"Because it is light around you; and then I can 
better hear and know what is going on in the world, 
that I did not want to leave." 

This obsessed lawyer and the obsessing spirit (through 
Judge Edmonds) then held a long conversation. 

Finally the Judge, who was both clairvoyant and 
clairaudient at the time, talked to the spirit kindly 
and friendly, telling him what to do — to leave the 
man, to look up, to pray, to ask the aid of God and 
angels for light, etc. 

" In a few weeks," said the Judge, " I met this law- 
yer again, and said: Well, how do you get along? " 

"Oh, finely; my health is good, and I have felt no 
desire to be profane, or to turn into the gin-shops 
along the streets." 

"Of course, you feel finely," replied the Judge; 
"for that spirit has been hanging about me more or 
less, half obsessing me. Actually, for several days the 
electric aura that he threw around me in his efforts to 
stay with me made me cross when I had no occasion 
for it, inclined me, for the moment, to profanity, and 
cold-hearted selfishness, and other vices. Seeing that 
I would not yield, and at the same time willing him to 
depart, together with reliance upon my angel helpers, 
he left." The Judge added that " a denial of obses- 
sions is a confession of ignorance touching the 



166 THE GADARENE. 

psychological effects of mind upon mind, and spheres 
infringing upon spheres." 

The Judge has had Catholic priests, after a thorough 
trial of their "holy water and prayers," send their 
mediumistic members, when wickedly disordered, to 
be demagnetized and released from the grasp oi 
obsessional spirits. 

During our recent visit to India an English officer 
told us certain facts respecting the method of casting 
out evil spirits by the Brahmins of the present day: 

North and east of Benares, the Sacred City of the 
Hindoos, is a mountain consecrated to the relief of the 
obsessed. The little city of Andipore, at the foot of 
this mountain, is often thronged by the obsessed, 
sent thither by the Brahmins to be dispossessed of 
their demons. Through this city runs the river 
Kistna. Up the sides of the mountain are boarding 
houses, and cells for the more unfortunate. Tradition 
says this mountain is holy, from having been " breathed 
upon by the gods." All admit the location to be 
retired and healthy. The obsessed are required to be 
abstemious in diet, bathe three times a day, repeating 
Brahminical j3rayers while bathing. Then they form 
a circle around the victim of the demon, the holiest of 
the priests vigorously pathetising him, and the 
remainder chanting prayers for the gods to take pos- 
session. Finally the priest puts forehead to forehead, 
knee to knee, mouth to mouth, and breathes or " blows " 
away the demon, saying holy words. 



SET THINE HOUSE IN OKDER. 167 

INJURY OF SUDDEN EXPULSION. 

"When an obsessing spirit lias full and perfect con- 
trol of its subject, a sudden dispossession may be 
injurious to the life of the subject. The New Testa- 
ment states several instances where Jesus cast out the 
evil spirits, that they tore their subjects, and on leav- 
ing them " left them as dead." A battle of course 
ensues, where two powerful batteries of will are thus 
exerted upon each other, and the peril falls most upon 
the person possessed. Cases are on record, occurring 
frequently, where the charmed bird falls at the shot 
that kills the obsessing snake. How much more potent 
is the psychological force that holds the delicate 
organism of a medium. 

As the true object should be in all dispossessions to 
benefit both the spirit and its subject, the wiser course 
to pursue is to enter into conversation with the spirit, 
instructively and kindly and firmly citing to a better 
life and the natural ways for attaining it, and so per- 
suade the spirit away. Speak to the obsessing powers as 
men, brothers, friends — reason with them as members 
of a common Father's family, and, at the same time 
demagnetizing the subject, bring a healthier, purer 
magnetism, and calmer, higher and more elevating 
influences to the patient's relief. 

Obsessions being adverse, inauspicious, psychological 
influences cast upon the organism — being the thoughts 
and feelings of individuals controlled by such spirits 
as are necessitated in accordance with the immutable 
laws of compensation to range for a season the lower 



168 THE GADAEENE. 

planes of life — the preventive lies in good health, 
good nature, and a good life; in the cultivation of 
broad, loving, aspirational aims, a firmness of moral 
principles, a determined purpose to do, dare, live the 
right, a calm trust in the overshadowing presence of 
the Infinite, and the holy watch-care of those beautiful 
angels that delight to do the will of heaven. Ill 
health, nervous affections, dejection, despair, suspicion, 
jealousies, expose the subject to obsessions, or they 
offer suitable conditions for demons inclined to fun, 
mischief or base schemings, to carry out their selfish 
plans. Truth attracts the true, wisdom the wise, love 
the lovely, charity the charitable, and purity the pure 
of all worlds. 

The virtue of a strong moral will of kindness was 
beautifully illustrated in an experience of the editor 
of the Banner of Light, Luther Colby. An Indian 
spirit visited him in the most ferocious manner, deter- 
mined to do mischief. Mr. Colby was calm, reasoned 
with him, persuaded him, and finally won his confi- 
dence, and afterward he became a most useful visitant 
in his band, rendering him essential service in many 
instances of peril and need. 

CUEING BY MUSIC. 

" Music hath charms," it is said, " to calm the savage 
breast." Who has not felt its power over despondency 
and even disease? Its love-notes are an all-cure to the 
soul. And if that music be of the spirits come to 
soothe us, who can resist its divinity? There is a 



SKT THINE HOUSE IN ORDER. 169 

legend that in an ancient city, when the bell of the 
temple rung, the " offending genii " took flight. There 
is a morality in music most potent in reforms, as the 
effect of popular songs upon society plainly indicates. 
Jamblichus, understanding this moral ratio, says in 
substance, that the melodies of the gods " insinuate 
themselves inspirationally into our spirits, and wholly 
work in us by their musical essences and power." We 
have a case in point recorded in the Old Testament 
(1 Samuel), wherein it is stated that the harp-playing 
of David dispossessed King Saul of an evil spirit: 

''And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from 
God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and 
played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was 
well, and the evil spirit departed from him." 

"Return no more, vain boclings of the night! 

A happier oracle within rny soul 
Hath swelled to power; a clear unvarying light 

Mounts thro' the battling clouds that round me roll, 
And to a new control 

Nature's full harp gives forth rejoicing tones, 

Wherein my glad sense owns 
The accordant rush of elemental sound 
To one consummate harmony profound; 

One grand creation hymn, 

Whose notes the seraphim 
Lift to the glorious height of music winged and crowned." 

15 



CHAPTEE IX. 

MEDIUMSHIP ORDERLY AND DISORDERLY. 

Spirits can do nothing outside of nature. Indeed 
there is no place to stand outside. Whatever mortals 
do, spirits aid. Need we puzzle our brains with the 
effort to distinguish which is mortal and which is 
spiritual agency? As well might we try to decide 
what part in the growth of a plant is attributable to 
the sun, what to the soil, what to the air, what to elec- 
tricity. We have no chemistry to analyze here. All 
nature is a unit; all forces blend as do drops in the 
ocean. Does not a touch upon any part of the human 
body affect the whole ? Does not a little thought com- 
municate itself to every nerve in the system? 

A spirit is virtually present wherever any of its acts 
or relics exist, or its sympathy extends. Take a bar 
of magnetized steel; divide or subdivide; each piece 
is a distinct magnet. Separate them ten feet, a hun- 
dred, a thousand, a mile, any distance; do we thus 
destroy the reciprocal relation? Mind is inseparable 
from its history. Between the mind and its sequences 
is an eternal union. What is memory but the registry 
of thought? Its record leaves are endless. Persons 
resuscitated from the drowning state aver that the 
(170) 



MEDIUMSiUP. 171 

experiences of life flash before them in a moment. 
"What a solemn truth here! How pathetically plead 
the very hours we live, to dot upon the soul beautiful 
deeds! Nothing, then, is plainer than that we never 
can be separated from each other. AW is one vast 
immortality. What if we pass away into the realm 
of spirit; the memory lives and brightens with use; 
and the sympathy is stronger than before, for the soul 
yearns after its counterpart to meet externally as they 
constantly meet internally. The separated spirit 
lingers in love with all the objects it has lived with. 
Yesterday the sun bathed all the landscape in light, 
and every particle of ground and drop of water was 
fused with its golden magnetism. Was the sympathy 
destroyed when the sun went down ? Everything 
turned a face sunward, seeking it, and in the effort to 
get close to it, crowding its fellow forward, there is a 
circuit of the earth round and round. Friends departed 
and friends remaining are intuitively drawn to each 
other. A lock of hair left, a picture, a letter, or name, 
anything ever associated with and polarized by the 
departed, has the imprint of the very love and thought 
of that revered friend. Spirit writing is never effaced. 
These things ever seek their magnetizer — the spirit 
gone; and to them that spirit is unconsciously, or con- 
sciously, sending forth a responsive influence. They 
never cease to be talismans of loving communication, 
because they are magnetically fed the same as the 
earth by the ever-burning sun. Hence, when we 
psychometrically touch such a relic, we are instantly 
put in rapport with the spirit that once magnetized it. 



172 THE GADARENE. 

MULTIFORM CONTROL. 

It is well known to every magnetizer, well skilled 
in his profession, that he can bring a large percentage 
of any congregation under his control, and make such 
think, feel and act alike; that when his subjects are 
in perfect rapport with him, he can control them with- 
out respect to distances; and that thus sick patients 
can be healed. The same law holds good with minis- 
tering spirits. Benjamin Franklin, or Black Hawk, 
for instance, can have his scores of mediums in the 
earth life, and at will can influence one or all of them 
at once, though in different parts of the world. If 
the sympathy is perfect, they are influenced without 
the volition of the spirit; that is, being enveloped in 
his spiritual sphere, they imbibe his thought, and 
understand his purposes, for they and he are one in 
the circle of life. Thus a dozen, or any number, of 
communications can be given at the same time to 
different media. The ruling spirit may also send as 
many representatives as he has circles, and essentially 
it would be the same as if present himself personally, 
for the will and thought of spirits on the same plane 
and in the same band, are in harmony. 

"Why can I not communicate with my own dear 
friend departed without the foreign agency of a 
medium?" This question is often asked. In the 
earth sphere friendships are formed principally on the 
external, material plane. Association, self-interest, 
organic sympathy, and other outward relations may 
induce endearments which at first experience may 



MEDHTMSHIP. 173 

appear to be lasting; but absence, distance, and changes 
of magnetisms sometimes cancel these affections. 
Nothing is enduring which is not spiritual. If, then, 
a friend, having passed the ordeal of death, has organ- 
ized his basis of love on the spiritual plane, and the 
earth-friend remains, as before, wholly external, the 
difference of condition amounts to a magnetic gulf 
that cannot be passed over except by mediation. A 
medium contains, in organization, the blended elements 
of physical and spiritual natures, and is able, there- 
fore, to conjoin the two parties for exchange of lan- 
guage by word or sign. The medium is the bridge or 
telegraph that spans from the internal spiritual to the 
external sensuous. When, then, so wide a conditional 
difference exists, is not a medium necessary before any 
tangible communication can be opened up between 
the two worlds? 

The spiritual batteries are very delicate; the least 
agitation of mind disturbs them and dilutes or per- 
verts the truthfulness of the oracles; hence the absolute 
need of candor, calmness and a childlike sincerity of 
purpose. If a weeping mother is over-anxious, she 
may thus defeat her object. If she is mediumistic, in 
such a state she can do nothing; a medium of less 
intensity of feeling is needed to restore order and 
open intercourse. 

It is a w r ell known fact, demonstrable in all spiritual 
circles, or in the action of artificial batteries, that they 
are operative to success- only when the forces are in 
order — positive with negative and negative with 



]74 THE GADARENE. 

positive. Great anxiety, fear, doubt, may produce a gen- 
eral confusion when all phenomena are destroyed; so 
if the inquirer is very willful, stubborn and positively 
repulsive. Excessive grief, despair or hopeless mourn- 
ing, naturally engendering discordant states, will neu- 
tralize the phenomena by absorption. 

NATURAL AND ACQUIRED MEDIUMSHIP. 

Mediumship is constitutional, does not depend on 
moral character, is often a birth right quality, and is 
acquirable by culture through the aid of circles. 
Where the mediumistic powers — which all more or 
less possess — are latent or undeveloped, it may re- 
quire long months and years of persistent effort to 
become receptive direct of spiritual influx. "We know 
of persons who have sat for a full year without a sign, 
at first, of spirit presence; but by perseverance at last 
removed the natural obstructions, or spiritualized the 
nervous system to the direct perception of spirits. 
The first victory to gain is putting oneself in a state 
of spiritual balance, and it comes when we faithfully 
attend to the conditions. 

Respecting the capability of a person's entering 
into intercourse with spirits, Jung Stilling says: 

" Fwst — A natural disposition to it consists in 
this: When the ethereal part or luminous body of the 
human soul does not imbibe many heavy particles 
from the blood, but keeps itself pure; by which means 
it borders more closely upon the invisible world. This, 
however, does not depend on the will of man, but on 
the internal organization of the body. 



MEDIUMS HIP. 175 

" Second — When the luminous body of the human 
soul receives any particular accumulation of power, so 
that it becomes more active than is necessary for life 
and sensation; it may then happen that the individual 
may appear in the invisible world and have intercourse 
with its inhabitants." 

ABUSES OF MEDIUMSIIIP. 

Nothing is more perilous to health and morals than 
bigoted prejudices and oppositions against medium- 
ship in a family or among friends. The medium is 
then in a cross-fire between forces, producing a smoth- 
ered condition of mind that in time reacts upon the 
whole body. Often do we find media entirely broken 
down and hopeless, and morally helpless, when long 
subjected to such discords. In the general confusion, 
should the opposing influences prevail, the medium 
becomes diseasedly negative, when some spirit of the 
same grade of character, to fill the painful vacuum, 
may take possession and hold a sullen and melancholic 
control here locked as in " chains of darkness." 

How many of us have learned the law, and yet how 
few practice it, that a positive skeptical mind, think- 
ing to detect fraud, silently neutralizes the magnetic 
current and deprives the medium of all power to act 
for the time being. Another fact must be considered, 
that media, being negative, live two lives, internal and 
external, and liable to be ensnared by almost any influ- 
ence of a positive nature, sometimes seemingly un- 
faithful to one's sense and to a betrayal thereof, while 



176 THE GADARENE. 

the true cause may lie in an influence unseen. Trace 
to the cause and we shall find just grounds for a world 
of charity. 

ORDERLY CIRCLES. 

All the powers of our being should be mediumized, 
if we would indeed be spiritual. We need our sacred 
hours when we can enter the closet of the soul for 
communion with the heavenly intelligences. Such a 
circle with one or two others, or even alone, is often 
the best. A promiscuous or dissonant circle is perilous 
to health and good morals. It jars and scatters. An 
orderly circle, having similarity of spheres as to 
planes, but variegated in electrical action to awaken 
inspiring influences, is characterized by sincere pur- 
poses, with strict attention to temperamental and 
psychological laws. 

The plane of the aggregated affections of the in- 
quirers molds the quality of the communication. We 
get what we seek. Every organ of the brain, and of 
the whole being in fact, ever emiting its correspond- 
ing magnetic sphere, calls for and receives its proper 
response. The orderly adjustment of these multiform 
forces is, therefore, very delicate. 

If possible, assemble in the same consecrated room 
once or twice a week, not often er, around the same 
table, with the same company at first, until the battery 
is strong enough to endure the presence of strangers 
without neutralizing the control. Such circles should 
also be regular. Have a journal kept of each meeting. 



MEDIUMSHIP. 177 

Reading sometimes in a spiritual train of thought, 
singing, and vocal or silent invocation, are essential 
helps. Avoid intellectual disputations, for they en- 
gender positive conditions, defeating the object. The 
moment a circle becomes monotonous, repellant or 
dozy, stop all operations, disband for a short time, till 
the electric forces are quickened again, when the 
experiment may be repeated, this time perhaps with 
success. Above all things, avoid too long sessions 
One hour of close attention, with lively feelings and 
affections, may be a safe rale. 

Phenomena should not be the main object, but 
simply the incidents. Even if no rappings or other 
manifestations occur, it is a beautiful success, provided 
the aspiration is holy. Spirits will reveal themselves 
in multiform proofs of their presence whenever we 
comply with the laws of an exalted mediumship. 

DISORDERLY CIRCLES. 

A disorderly spiritual circle, established from curi- 
osity, attractive to itself by passional demands, with 
no higher aim than to "get the manifestations," with 
no moral ambition to be better in life for the spiritual 
intercourse, is in fact the most subtile peril that can 
possibly entangle the unwary. We are not surprised 
that Dr. Edward Beecher, unfortunately observing 
only the perverse kind, and thence from prejudices 
refusing to investigate the good of orderly circles, so 
emphatically criticised what he saw and felt: 

"Colorless daylight does not enter that fane; a 



178 THE GADARENE. 

sepulchral taint sickens the atmosphere, and he who 
has not by effort and practice gained command over 
himself, exclaims, ' If I stay long in this place I shall 
lose my senses; let me escape from it while I can.' " 
Had Mr. Beecher been as wise here as he is even in 
his church relations, "proving all things," condemning 
no cause because it is so abused, he would have had 
large credit for this angelic method of communication. 

DARK CIECLES. 

"Why does the photographer develop his pictures in 
the dark? The fact is, light is the neutralizer of his 
chemical designs. Some maintain that the human 
eye, being a powerful magnetizer, acts precisely upon 
the processes of spiritual chemistry or phenomena, as 
light does upon the incipient photograph. 

Night is the negative state of nature, receptive of 
influences necessary to recuperation. Man's positive 
labors closed, his mind, enveloped in the solemn silence 
all around him, driving the forces of the senses to 
their centres, engendering reflections upon death and 
the " world to come," is better conditioned to receive 
spiritual impression. If he is calm, trustful, truth- 
loving — the initial of heavenly communings — 
trooping angels, obedient to his inmost prayer, respond 
in revelations. During the day they are not so much 
needed, for then all our powers are active, on the alert, 
watching, planning, executing; but at night the intel- 
lectual brain sinks down in its beautiful temple for 
repose, and the spiritual affections, more free, rise to 
greet the guardian visitants, to bask in the celestial 



MEDIUMSHIP. 179 

sunshine, to wander in dreams and visions, and poise 
themselves on some holy mountain of thought, 
prophet-like, preparatory for practical work. 

Says Dr. .N. B. Wolfe, author of "Startling Facts 
in Modern Spiritualism:" "In the absence of solar 
rays the integuments of the eye become so highly 
sensitized that they develop a more perfect luminous 
condition than they can in the face of day. Thus the 
dark room becomes to the eye what the dark tube of 
the microscope becomes to sight — an augmentive 
power, which reveals the wonderful phenomena of 
millions of creatures in a dewdrop. The telescope, in 
like manner, with its lenses and dark chamber, assists 
the eye to penetrate space so remote that the added 
power makes the senses ache. Telescope the earth, 
and from the bottom of a well you may see stars at 
the high noon of clay." 

It may be of some utility to the inquirer here to 
state that most of the spiritual phenomena of the Bible 
was produced in the night, thus showing a perfect par- 
allel between the ancient and modern, centralizing in 
immutable law, repeatable in effect under similar 
conditions and necessities. 

At night Jesus had his heavenly worship; at night 
he calmed the stormy sea of Tiberias; at night he 
walked upon its waves; at night the prison doors 
opened by the power of spirits to emancipate Peter; 
at night the stone was rolled from the sepulchre, and 
the crucified came forth, conquerer of " death and hell." 

Dark circles do not incidentally imply dark spirits. 



180 THE GADARENE. 

The good can be trusted at all times. If tricksters 
abuse our confidence, it is no reason that we should 
ignore a natural law, or cease to use it in conversion. 
Let us not judge principles by human actions. If we 
have been deceived, why, all is, be more vigilant in the 
right. The underlying science is not harmed by any 
humbugs. If even one suffering mortal, long wan- 
dering in the gloom of atheism, can, in a dark circle, 
catch the faintest view of the star of immortal hope, 
it is worth a world to him. We ought not to be indif- 
ferent to others' claims for occular evidence. 

We sincerely believe, however, that the dark must 
give place, largely, to the light circle. No truth need 
long be hidden. The fact that some phases of the spir- 
itual phenomena can be produced in the light is a sure 
augury of honest sunshine by and by. 

A PLEA FOR THE MEDIUMS. 

Suppose we were to abolish the postoffice system, or 
the telegraph, and depend upon the chances of travel 
for communication, would it not be a retrogression 
against which every person in the land would revolt? 
Suppose the opposers of spiritual ministry should suc- 
ceed in putting down all the mediums in the country, 
and in driving the spirits back, leaving the world only 
what it had before, only the traditions and symbols of 
immortality, what would be the loss? The very thought 
of thus blotting out forever all the heavenly phe- 
nomena from mankind is most painful. 

Mediumship is the spiritual postoffice, the telegraph, 
the oceanic cable of love that marries this life with the 



MEDIUMSHIP. 181 

life to come. By it immortality has been demonstrated, 
the sorrowing consoled, the benighted enlightened, the 
dying rejoiced, the bereft blessed with unspeakable 
gladness, the diseased healed, the reformers of a new 
age projected. It pertains to all grades of human life, 
connects with all hearts, and is as general to our suf- 
fering humanity as are nerves in the physical system. 
No price can parallel its value; no language can paint 
its moral virtue, when rightly applied ; no angel can 
tell what blessedness it brings to the children of earth. 
"We allow there are deceptions unavoidably associated 
as parasites with medium ship, but we aver there are 
less in fact than in other departments of our religious 
life. Compare it with the solemn mockery and cant 
of formal worship, or the hypocrisy that lurks under 
the garb of ecclesiastic respectability. 

The success of medium ship depends very much 
upon faith, or confidence in the parties operating. 
Delicate to the touch of a thought, subject to all the 
magnetisms around it, liable by the least will-force to 
be diverted from a straight course of news-telling from 
the heavenly shore, it is indeed a wonder there is no 
more ambiguity or uncertainty in the communications. 
It shows the moral potency of angelic control, and the 
secure hope it brings of ultimate triumph for reliable 
revelations. If believers cultivate doubt, and blast 
their own instruments of industry, what result can 
we expect but that the jeering world, aiding the 
destruction of heavenly commerce, will gloat as devils 
over fallen angels plunged to the hell of atheism again? 






182 THE GADARENE. 

Many a poor medium has been pressed unconsciously 
and unintentionally to assist the spirits when condi- 
tions produced by repulsions were unfavorable. 
Reputed as having a most contemptible profession, 
many a chosen one in a moment of despair has cut the 
silver telegraphing that connects with the divine, and 
sunk back bleeding and fainting in spiritual darkness. 
"Who shall write accurately what inward pains the 
mediums have endured; what persecutions have slain 
best affections; what injustice has stabbed their hearts? 
There are experiences here revealing the truth that 
" fact is stranger than fiction." " In secret have I 
said nothing," is the answer of the maligned to the 
crucifiers. If anything is to be pardoned in our world, 
it is that mediumship which is by force of magnetic 
piracy compelled to be a blind leader of the blind. A 
kind word, a loving confidence, a defensive attitude 
around our mediums, will entwine them with wreaths 
of moral beauty. We plead for the mediums. Tell it 
round the world, publish it in the Summer-Land, that 
the mediums must be, and shall be, defended and pro- 
tected, loved and appreciated, succored and rewarded, 
as laborers worthy of their hire. 

UNMEDIATED SPIRITUALITY. 

Infancy is a dependency — cared for by another — a 
physical mediumship. In subsequent years the once- 
child, now a man, assumes an independent action, is a 
supplier in turn, a ministrant. It should be so with 
our spiritual growth. Our first step here is the phe- 
nomenal, essential to knowledge as the nine digits to 



MEDIUMSHIP. 183 

mathematics. But it would be just as consistent to 
confine a scholar to a commutation of these figures for 
amusement, as to be continuously chasing mere appear- 
ances. If this were all, what the profit? What the 
moral gain from rope-tying, rapping, the psychic play 
of automatic brain, or anything else of the kind? 
They are only signs — husks of the ripening corn. 
The soul must be fed on adaptable food; but if here 
starved, being alone bnt little better than theology, it 
must in time madden its best affections. The phe- 
nomenal is physical, appeals to the sensuous, invites 
the grosser, enriches here as a garden prepared for the 
planting; but if wanting in moral protection and cul- 
ture, it surely is infested with weeds, nerve fevers, 
passional promiscuities, and obsessional relations that 
give the face a demoniac look, glazed eyes, and tarn- 
ished expressions — the mad stare of spiritual insanity. 
Let facts all around us decide the matter! We have 
yet to find a solitary, happy Spiritualist who can fur- 
nish no stronger evidence of his enlightenment than 
contortions of muscles or the concussions of electric 
forces by the raps that come simply to arrest attention; 
and it is a questionable morality in Spiritualism if the 
best communications one receives are profane and vul- 
gar. True, all this evidences a life beyond, that it but 
continues this life, retaining the legitimate effects of 
rudimental inversions, and so far should warn us how 
we use our precious gifts; but when, as very many 
professed Spiritualists do, such communications are 
sought and invited with a chuckling ribaldry, without 



184 THE GADABENE. 

tlie least effort or inclination on the part of the inquir- 
ers to demand the reformation of such spirits, themselves 
the patterns first, it is a wonder that their souls do not 
rot with their impure bodies ere death gravitates them 
more directly to the plane they have established. 
Write it down, write it indelibly upon the memories 
of the coming generation of Spiritualists, that phe- 
nomenal Spiritualism, with its sensuous associations, 
is as essential to progress as steam to an engine; but 
write it so legibly as never to be forgotten, that with- 
out moral courage and conscientions intelligence 
cultivated and practiced, this spiritual steam becomes 
our greater and swifter ruin! And write in letters of 
flaming light, like that which startled Belshazzar and 
his companionable revellers, when a spirit hand traced 
the fiery sentence: "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin — 
Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found 
wanting!" that a sensuous mediumship, careless of 
responsibility, brings a mixed multitude of spirits that 
will k ' enter in " and make such an organism a living 
tomb, " full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness." 
No lofty character has yet been developed here. It is 
an impossibility. A sensuous mediumship, rightly 
related, is not a finality, but a ministrant, the same as 
the body should be to the spirit. To accomplish the 
design of wise spirits in thus opening the heavens 
upon earth in tangible proof of immortality, the phe- 
nomenal shotild be preserved in active culture as a 
rudimental process; but when the inquirers are thus 
convinced, a further continuance of such evidences 



MEDIUMSIIIP. 185 

to them becomes a forced invite to spirits, and so 
an obsession. There is something ahead of this, 
and if not sought and attained, that sonl is the worse 
imprisoned for such control. As the flash and destruc- 
tion of electricity from the cloud enters into the 
growth of vegetation and animal life, so must phenom- 
enal Spiritualism, though repeating itself from age to 
age, merge into a more exalted configuration of intel- 
lectual and moral character, and there be no longer 
phenomenal, but a silent presence of the holy angel. 
Any other Spiritualism is an abortion — a spiritual 
disease and death! 

There is, then, an unmediated spirituality, when 
evidences come direct to us personally, when a second 
or third individual, so far from aiding us, casts a 
shadow, and so obscures the brighter vision. Every 
soul possesses innately a capacity to be in the fullness 
of time a focus of all immortalities of love and truth; 
to be a god verily, as Jesus was, who, when unmedi- 
ated, or thoroughly spiritualized, could honestly say: 
"All power is given me in heaven and in earth." 
The beloved apostle, John, spoke of this attainment 
thus: "I was in the spirit on the Lord's day." 
Buddha spoke of it as a heart that has " penetrated 
the deep principles of universal mind." Christna 
is represented as calling it an " eternal absorption into 
the divine nature." Our Davis, " the Poughkeepsie 
seer," happily styles it " The Superior State." It is 
indeed the unmediated celestial experience, when 
immortality has a breathing in our very consciousness. 
16 






CHAPTEK X. 

SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 

The spiritual philosophy puts into the hand of 
investigators the key which unlocks the mysteries 
of the past and the marvels of the present. Wherever 
Bibles have been written, or prophets have lived; 
wherever seers have been illumined or saints walked 
and worshiped; wherever the dreamer has dreamed 
of a coming Eden, and freedom sung of a millenial 
era; wherever a great mind or a combination of great 
minds have lifted the waiting souls of generations into 
a higher civilization, there was the vitalizing element 
of Spiritualism. 

Man is a worshiping being. He instinctively adores 
the ancient, the experienced, the wise, the good, the 
beautiful. This is the dome of his life, the highest 
and best, for which all other service is disciplinary. 
Without it man is not man. With his intellectual 
and passional nature, though never so large, he cannot 
pass over to the "Most High" if the arch of his 
spiritual and reverential is not erected from the seen 
into the unseen, as a bridge from shore to shore. 

"The universe," says J. Burns, of England, " is in 
every part alive, and has been living and thriving ever 
and ever. Everything in it is alive, and all members 
(186) 



SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 187 

and portions of it are ceaselessly and industriously 
Land in hand, with one aim and purpose, developing 
forms of life, life, life. There is no dead matter: all 
is animated with a great, intelligent, self-regulating 
soul; and we cannot imagine a time when this state 
of things did not exist; when ideas from this interior, 
intelligent fountain were not being incarnated in forms 
and perpetuating an independent individual existence, 
types of the great original. Granting, then, this 
eternity of being to be a fact — that the illimitable, 
intelligent, vital, and divine vortex of all that forms, 
animates, and energizes has flowed on forever through 
matter, its external body or receptive principle — then 
we have an incessant series of vital forms, the result 
of the conjoined action of Father God, the positive or 
male principle, and Mother Nature, the receptive or 
female principle." 

No greater mistake can writers of the Christian or 
anti-Christian schools make than when they aver from 
historic records that the religious races, Biblical or 
classic, have ever taught an abstract Polytheism dis- 
connected from the Monotheistic idea. Is it not a 
very superficial comprehension of the deeps of human 
mind, or its natural intuition, to conclude it is idola- 
trous, or Polytheistic, because its conception of God is 
limited exactly to the measure of its capacity? What 
is the ideal, even of the most expanded intelligence, 
but limited to finite relations? What are the cloth- 
ings of principles, whether ideal or visibly substantial, 
but finites? Living in a world of forms — forever 



188 THE GADAKENE. 

living there — where impersonal principles are organ- 
ized, and therefore limited in space, we instinctively 
institute religious systems correspondingly circum- 
scribed, just as we are mentally and affection ally 
keyed in degree of unfoldment. 

THE TRANSCENDENT LAW. 

The idea of God is germinal in the human soul. It 
is traceable through all the forms of Fetishism, Sabe- 
ism, Polytheism, and Monotheism, to pure Theism, 
culminating in the Spiritualistic idea of to-day, of a 
divine paternity and maternity, "who is above all, 
through all, and in us all." What Christians have 
bigotedly accused the heathen of as idolatrous, was 
ever to them but symbols of the Infinite, as forming 
itself in their constructive imaginations. Thus, an 
English missionary relates that, standing with a ven- 
erable Brahmin to witness the sacred images carried 
in pomp and cast into the Ganges, he said: 

"Behold your gods; made with hands; thrown into 
a river." 

" What are they, sir? " replied the Brahmin. " Only 
dolls! That is well enough for the ignorant, but not 
for the wise." 

And he went on to quote from the ancient Hindoo 
laws of Menu: 

" The world lay in darkness, as asleep. Then He 
who exists for Himself, the Most High, the Almighty, 
manifested Himself and dispelled the gloom. He 



SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 189 

whose nature is beyond our reach, whose beiug escapes 
onr senses, who is invisible but eternal — He, the all- 
pervading Spirit, whom the mind cannot grasp, even 
He shone forth." 

Says Rev. Samuel Longfellow: "Wherever Poly- 
theism has prevailed there has been a vague sense of 
unity accompanying it and growing clearer with grow- 
ing intelligence. One of the gods comes to be regarded 
as supreme, and the others to be but his ministers or 
angels. The Jehovah of the Jews appears at first to 
have been conceived of as not the only God, but the 
special God of their nation, superior to the gods of the 
other nations. Thus, even in Homer, we find a tend- 
ency to gather up into Zeus as centre and source all 
the functions of the other divinities. 

"The Egyptians believed in a 'first God; being 
before all, and alone; fountain of all.' 

"The Aztecs, of Mexico, with their more than two 
hundred deities, recognized one Supreme Creator and 
Lord, whom they addressed in their prayers as ' the 
God by whom we live,' ' omnipresent, that knoweth 
all thoughts, and giveth all gifts,' ' without whom man 
is as nothing,' 'invisible, incorporeal; one God, of 
perfect perfection and purity.' 

" So the ancient Peruvians had their ' Creator and 
Sustainer of Life; ' the American Indians their Great 
Spirit, 'Master of Life;' the Scandinavians their 
All-Father. 

" And where the forms of polytheistic mythology 
occupied the popular mind, the intelligent and philo- 



190 THE GADARENE. 

sophic have always regarded these as but the shapes 
of fancy, and taught a pure doctrine of the unity and 
spirituality of God. Socrates tells of the joy with 
which he read in a book of Anaxagoras, that the uni- 
verse was a creation of Mind. And Xenophanes, as 
Aristotle relates, casting his eyes upward to the heav- 
ens, declared the One is God. He condemned the 
prevalent mythologies and the notions of gods in 
human figure, and severely blamed Hesiod and Homer 
for their scandalous tales about the gods. He taught 
that ' there is one supreme God among beings divine 
and human. * * * He governs all things by the 
power of reason.' 

" The Pythagoreans taught the unity of God, and 
compared him to a circle whose centre is everywhere, 
whose circumference nowhere. 

" ' There are not different gods for different nations,' 
wrote Plutarch. ' As there is one and the same sun, 
moon, sky, earth, and sea for all men, though they call 
them by different names, so the One Spirit which gov- 
erns this universe, the Universal Providence, receives 
among different nations different names.' 

" ' There is but one God, who is everywhere,' says 
Marcus Aurelius, the Eoman Emperor. 

" ' God is everywhere,' wrote an Aztec mother to 
her daughter. 

" ' In all this conflict of opinions,' says Maximus 
Tyrius, ' know that through all the world sounds one 
consenting law and idea, that there is one God, the 



SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 191 

King and Father of all, and many gods, the children 
of God. This both the Greek and the Barbarian teach.' 

" The Hindu, ' Bhagavad Gita,' speaks of ' the 
Supreme, Universal Spirit, the Eternal Person, divine, 
before all gods, omnipresent. Creator and Lord of 
all that exists; God of gods, Lord of the universe.' 
In a Buddhist tract we read: ' There appears in the 
law of Buddha only one Omnipotent Being.' And 
again, 'He is a Supreme Being above all others; and 
although there are many gods, yet there is a Supreme 
who is God of the gods.' Hue relates a conversation 
with a Thibetan Lama, who said to him: 'We must 
not confound religious truth with the superstitions 
which amuse the credulity of the ignorant. There is 
but one sole Sovereign Being, who has created all 
things. He is without beginning, and without end: 
He is without body, He is a spiritual substance.' 

" In the Mazdean, or Zoroastrian belief, Ormuzd is 
spoken of as ' omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipres- 
ent; formless, self-existent, and eternal; pure and holy; 
Lord over all the creatures in the universe; the refuge 
of those who seek his aid.' 

"Upon a temple at Delphi was the inscription 
J£t= Thou art. And upon this Plutarch writes, 'We 
say to God, Thou art: giving Him thus His true name, 
the name which belongs alone to Him. For what 
truly hf That which is eternal, which has never had 
beginning by birth, never will have end by death, that 
to which time brings no change. It would be wrong 
to say of Him who is, that He was or will be, for 



192 THE GADAKENE. 

these words express changes and vicissitudes. God 
alone is: He is, not after the fashion of things meas- 
ured by time, but by an immovable and unchanging 
eternity. For Him there is no he/ore nor after, but 
by a single now he fills the forever. And nothing 
truly is but He alone! ' 

" Again, after denying the fable of the birth and 
education of Jove, Plutarch says: 'There is nothing 
before Him, He is the first and most ancient of beings, 
the author of all things: He was from the beginning; 
too great to owe his existence to any other than him- 
self. From his sight is nothing hid. * * * Night 
and slumber never weigh upon that infinite eye, which 
alone looks upon the truth. By Him we see, by Him 
we have all which we possess. Giver of all good, 
ordainer of all which is, and which happens, it is He 
who gives all and makes all. In Him are the begin- 
ning, the end, the measure, the destiny of every 
thing.' " 

" The name Father is used as familiarly in the 
Hindoo hymns as in the Christian. Thus, in the 
Rig Yeda: ' May our Father, Heaven, be favorable 
to us; may that Eternal One protect us evermore. 
We have no other friend, no other Father.' * * * 
1 The Father of Heaven, who is the Father of men.' 

" ' Father of gods and of men,' says Hesiod, of 
Zeus. Homer repeats it. A similar recognition of 
a Supreme Paternity is mentioned by Horace, Plu- 
tarch, Seneca, Epictetus, Philo, and others. 

" In the Vishnu Purana, an ancient Brahrninic 



SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 193 

Scripture, we read: 'The earth is upheld by the 
veracity of those who have subdued their passions, and 
following righteousness, are never polluted with desire, 
covetousness, or wrath.' ' The Eternal makes not his 
abode in the heart of the man who covets another's 
goods, who injures any living creature, who utters 
harshness or untruth, who is proud in his iniquity, 
and his thoughts are evil.' 

" ' Kesava [a name of God] is most pleased with him 
who does good to others, who never utters calumny 
or falsehood, who never covets another's wife or 
another's goods, who does not smite or kill, who desires 
always the welfare of all creatures and of his own soul, 
whose pure heart taketh no pleasure in the imperfec- 
tions of love and hatred. The man who conforms to 
the duties enjoined in the Scripture is he who best 
worships Vishnu [God]: there is no other way.' 

" ' The duties incumbent alike on all classes" are the 
support of one's own household, marriage for the sake 
of offspring, tenderness toward all creatures, patience, 
humility, truth, purity, freedom from envy, from 
repining, from avarice, from detraction.' 

"'Know that man to be the true worshiper of 
Vishnu, who, looking upon gold in secret, holds 
another's wealth but as grass, and directs all his 
thoughts to the Lord.' 'The Brahmin must look 
upon the jewels of another as if they were but 
pebbles.' " 
17 



394 THE GADARENE. 



HEBREW MONOTHEISM. 



Hebrewism, whence the Christian religion is more 
directly derived, is but a contraction of Egyptian 
Cosmic Mythology; and here, as elsewhere, did those 
Israelitish seers and sages, prophets and teachers, 
strive to embody in their worship the Monotheistic 
idea. They discovered the natural tendency of the 
masses was to the sensuous; they would lift up into 
the spiritual of centralization. They did not deny the 
religious naturalness of Polytheism ; in fact they 
acknowledged it in their efforts to establish the 
supremacy of Jehovah over other gods. " Thou shalt 
have no other gods before me," was the order of the 
great I Am of the Hebrews. Though their Jehovah 
was revealed to them representatively by angels, and 
indicated directly His selfish policies circumscribed to 
Israel alone — thus proving His personal priesthood — 
yet His devotees, as all other worshipers did and do, 
attributed to Him unlimited capacities. Thus, in the 
personal they opened up ideally toward the infinitely 
impersonal. He was revered as Creator, Euler, and 
Lord. What is this but a sublime Monotheism? 

Jesus, of the New Testament of the Lord, recog- 
nized the Monotheistic idea, and made it his cardinal 
rallying point. His Father was his infinite of aspira- 
tion. The angels who ministered to him were but 
messengers of his Father. What a terse definition 
from the interior man ! " God is a spirit, and they 
that worship Him must worship Plim in spirit and in 



SHALL WE WOESillP SPIRITS? 195 

truth." The Pauline disciples of the Nazarene con- 
tinued the same teachings concerning God, "in whom 
we live, and move, and have our being; " and John, 
the beloved, and exponent of apostolic affection, added 
a newer beauty still to the ideal: « God is love, and he 
that dwelleth in love chvelleth in God and God in him." 
But here, too, is the recognition of the Polytheistic 
accompaniments of Monotheism. Spirits, angels, 
and archangels, are held in obeyance as ministrants. 
Angels in the desert, in Gethsemane, at the crucifixion, 
at the resurrection, were to Jesus the agencies of his 
Father's will, and through his love and obedience to 
them did he "worship the Father in spirit and in 
truth." Angels, too, were the Apostles' guards and 
guides, " sent to them who shall be heirs of salvation," 
but ever recognized as subordinate to the Lord of all, 
" who is above all, and in all." 

BLENDING DEIFIC IDEAS. 

Hastily scanning the historic religions, nothing is 
plainer than that Monotheism and Polytheism have 
been parallel — have, in fact, been blended. It cer- 
tainly is in accordance with the structure of the 
universe, and of man, the transcript thereof. Every- 
thing in the external world is diverse, multiform, 
variegated — philosophically Polytheistic. Man is all 
this, infinitely changing in action and attribute, a unity 
in diversity. Through all runs a central life, one great 
soul, one heart-beat, one infinite law of love. Poly- 
theism is but the outgrowth of Monotheism — its 



196 THE GADAEENE. 

eternal manifestation and its ministration to a beau- 
tiful necessity. 

And that beautiful necessity is the transcendent law 
of progress. As says Theodore Tilton, in his Golden 
Age, comparing the " Old and New Religions: " 

" The world is growing better, not worse. The past 
is dim in comparison w T ith the brighter present. The 
future will eclipse both. Who can guess the glories 
of the golden age ! Oh, to have remained unborn until 
the coming time — until the latest generation of man- 
kind ! But better this day than Plato's. The world 
now has a thousand sweets for the human soul which 
were never tasted by the patriarchs and prophets. And 
chief among all the reasons why one should prefer to 
live in the nineteenth century, rather than to have 
heard the harp-strings of David, or to have worshiped 
in the temple of Solomon, is the sublime fact that the 
world has a new religion to take the place of the old — 
a religion which lifts from our mortal life the over- 
hanging clouds of a wrathful future — a religion by 
which death is stripped of its terrors and reclothed 
with sweet delights — a religion by which human 
hearts are taught to banish hatreds and to cherish 
love — a religion which shows God with a beckoning 
finger instead of a red right hand — a religion whose 
teacher says to the erring sons of men, ' I will not 
accuse you to the Father ' — a religion which opens 
wide the gates of heaven, and proclaims to all man- 
kind, ' Whosoever will, let him come! ' 

" The greatest achievement of the human intellect 



SHALL WE WOKSHIP SPIRITS? 197 

throughout the whole course of human history is that 
triumph of faith which, against the traditions of the 
ages, has substituted for the flame-lit scowl of an angry 
Jupiter the ineffable benignity of our Father's face." 

RELIGIOUS MISTAKE. 

Human nature educationally oscillates from Polythe- 
ism to Monotheism, and vice versa. The inter-relation 
of the two does not seem to have been continuously 
recognized. Hence the profane extremism or the cold- 
ness of the devotee. The Polytheistic corresponds 
with affection ; the Monotheistic with mental confidence. 
The world is now swinging from the Monotheistic to 
the Polytheistic, almost losing sight of the former in 
its joyful discovery of so "great a cloud of witnesses." 
Hence the theological chaos. 

We would not for worlds lessen the value of the 
Polytheistic idea, but we are sure, from years of expe- 
rience and observation, that this alone fails to inspire 
reverence and devotion. Are not the prevailing pro- 
fanities largely traceable to this loss in the soul — the 
loss of the Monotheistic centrality of faith and deific 
communion? But the Polytheistic has the warmth 
of love, and incites us to the first Great Cause where 
the soul can rest. Those of us who have been schooled 
in angel ministry, who have been ushered into their 
presence, heard their bosoms throb on ours, felt the 
breathings of their inspirations, have learned this great 
truth: That our angels are constantly devising ways 
and means, direct or indirect, whereby to benefit us. 



198 THE GADARENE. 

When an earth- cry of sorrow trembles up to the spirit 
realm, some loving angel bounds in response, perhaps 
in silence, and immediately finds some one who can 
help. It may be to influence a man to draw a load of 
wood to a tireless sick home, or a bag of flour to hun- 
gry children, or a garment to a shivering stranger, or 
a loving word to a starved and forlorn heart. 

Is it not a privileged duty and joy to pray to the 
angels, the same as we do to each other in every-day 
needs? to come often into the chamber of inner com- 
munion with them ? The more frequent such prayer, 
with the object of discharging all practical responsi- 
bilities, the closer are we embosomed by the life of 
faith in their great world of love, growing us in their 
intellectual and moral images of character. 

This Polytheistic worship, when centralized in soul 
to the recognition and embodiment of principles, is 
inductive — more interiorly — to aspiration after the 
essentially spiritual — the Impersonal of the Personal. 
Every mind, clothed according to grade of affectional 
intelligence, is conscious of a holy presence every- 
where, of immeasurable love above and within us, of a 
divinity that is shaping all events, and that this 
divinity is cognate with natural law, developing us 
into the likeness of the ingermed beauty. The spir- 
itual mind sees and feels design, intelligence, affection, 
Providence, and thence a worship in beneficent use, in 
rocks, waters, vegetations, animals, humanities, resting 
at length in the absolute of knowledge that this Inner 
Soul, whom we call God, is not a blind law, but a 



SHALL WE WORSHIP SPIRITS? 199 

causative Wisdom, an esse of Love, binding all to agree, 
teaching us that when we are inspired by the beauty 
that Hashes all around us, we are inspired of God; 
when we love justice and practice it, we are justified 
in God; when we sun our souls in the sweet lovelight 
of a brother or sister, or a child, we are communing 
with God; when we welcome a holy angel, we welcome 
God; when we forgive those who trespass against us, 
we understand God's forgiving love ; when we love the 
good, the beautiful, and true, God is opening to us the 
gates of heaven. To lie low and feel humble and still, 
to sense sweetness in the hearts of all things; to enter 
deeper and deeper into the Soul of souls; to love all, 
to bless all, this is finding God; this is the Emanuel; 
this is God translated and translating into our inner 
life. 

" The song of life the atom sings, 
Is one with that by angels sung; 
For atoms form the finest strings, 

With which the grandest harp is strung. 
And what are angels more than atoms strung 
To give the harmonies diviner tongue V 

" Divinest harmonies that fill 

And permeate the boundless whole; 
And which, like falling dews, distill 
In softest music on the soul; 
"While souls attuned to catch the grand refrain, 
In soul responses echo back the strain. 

" And thus life's anthem onward floats, 
In ceaseless strains of melody ; 
While seeming discords swell the notes 
Of that unbroken harmony 
Which sweeps the strings of God's eternal lyre, 
In each succeeding sphere an octave higher. " 

— Geo. Kates. 



CHAPTEK XI. 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 



Ruskin, in his "Ethics of Dust," says: "For the 
ounce of slime which we had for political economy 
of competition, we have by political economy of co-op- 
eration, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the 
midst of a star of snow." 

A pharisaical spirit reveals a low plane of bigotry 
allied with both worlds. If any people are most 
lamentably obsessed, it is those who cherish such a 
spirit. The sarcastic thrust of the fatalistic author of 
"Whatever is, is Eight," applies: 

"There is a great deal of common sense in these 
obsessing ' devils,' as they are called. They have 
dropped the airs of self-righteousness themselves, 
and are making others do the same. They are better 
educated in spiritual things than the man is who feels 
holy himself, and says, ' In the name of God I com- 
mand you devils to depart.' * * : * 

" Let us, in our feeble spiritual development, be 
truthful to the spirit obsessing, and not say to him: 
Come up from the darkness you are in, to the light 
that we are in ; but rather let us be conscious of our 
own condition, and say to the spirit, Take our hands, 
and lead us from the darkness that surrounds us, to 
(200) 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 201 

the light that you possess. Let us remember it is 
folly to try to cast out a mote from the spirit's eye, 
when we have a beam in our own. Meet an obsessing 
spirit in the clouds of self- righteousness, and he will 
act very bad, and do much mischief, and befoul us; 
meet him on a platform of common sense and reason, 
and he will meet us as a man. Take off the airs and 
phantoms of self-superiority in religion and spiritual 
goodness, and obsession will cease forever." 

How true it is that good people never brag of their 
piety; they are modest and unpretentious. And those 
who put on airs of superexcellence are ever broken 
in upon at the vulnerable points. 

the poor Indian's hope. 

And what if even the poor Indians, whom the 
" pale faces " are pushing into their Pacific graves, 
prove themselves braver in death, and after death 
"returning good for the evil we do them" — what if 
they are nearer the Christ-life than their murdering 
Christian brethren? 

Henry B. Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota, one of 
the strongest and best friends the poor red-men have, 
relates a circumstance, of his knowledge, illustrative 
of the Indian character: "Among the Indians impris- 
oned in connection with the horrible Minnesota mas- 
sacre of 1862, was a distinguished Indian who was 
visited in prison by a gentleman who was a physician. 
The Indian, being desirous of knowing a little of the 
probable fate that was before him, asked the physician 



202 THE GADARENE. 

what lie thought the Government would do with him. 
The physician, apprehending his case was a hopeless 
one, hesitated to answer the inquiry. The Indian 
repeated his question, when the doctor said to the 
Indian, calling him by name, ' I fear they will hang 
you.' The Indian dropped his eyes a moment to the 
floor, then raised them, looked steadily at the doctor 
and calmly remarked: 'Well, I don't care; I am not 
afraid to die; when I go to the spirit world, I will go 
up to the Great Spirit, and look Him right in the face, 
and tell Him of the multiplied wrongs and cruelties 
inflicted on His red children by the white man, and 
He won't scold me much." 

SPIRITS MAY BE BETTER THAN THEY SEEM. 

"Very proper people infer, because a spirit produces 
contortions of the medium's muscles, or causes a 
medium to dance, run or pound himself and others, 
that they are evil. It only shows their ignorance 
of magnetic laws and conditions. Such activity may 
be essential to better control and health. We know 
of a case where an Indian spirit made a medium run 
around a house three times with hot speed ere he 
could be allowed to lay hands on a sick child. The 
magnetic force, then powerful, was effectual in heal- 
ing. The whirl of the Dervishes, the dancing of the 
Shakers, the muscular trembling of the Quakers, the 
pounding of the Flagellettes, are inductive to mag- 
netic sphericity with such souls and better spiritual 
influx. 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDEKED. 203 

Nor is it a criterion of evil design because of blun- 
dering in the communication. There are ignorant 
spirits who experiment their way into knowledge by 
an effort at revealing themselves, and of course through 
imperfect media, at first make a poor headway. Be 
patient; time will develop wonderful things. 

Fanny Green McDougal, relating one of her visions 
to Brittari's Quarterly Journal, speaks of a " class of 
spirits that have been operatives in the cotton-mills of 
England. They have lived in such a state of deformity 
and dwarf hood that they could no more conceive of 
the duties and rights of a free human soul than they 
could conceive themselves possessed of a royal pomp 
and power. They must change their state and come 
into better material conditions before they can progress 
spiritually. After a while they may have an ideal 
emigration to America, or something equivalent. 
Then they will have the idea of better wages, and 
more time for self-improvement." 

"But they know, at least, that they are in the Spirit 
"World," I ventured to say; "and if so, all these fan- 
tasms must appear the height of absurdity. Is it the 
office of wise and good spirits to cherish these illu- 
sions? Nay, is it consistent with a strict regard for 
truth?" 

" I answer thy last question first, because it is often 
asked, and has never yet received the full and broad 
answer which its importance demands. It is not so 
much literal fact as the spirit of things that consti- 
tutes truth or falsehood. How should it affect science 



204: THE GADAKENE. 

to know if Newton founded his theory on the fall of 
one or two apples? The principle involved is the only 
important thing about it. And precisely in this way 
have spirits been accused of lying, when they have 
given as much of truth as could be understood or 
accepted. It is conceded by all liberal moralists that 
the intention to deceive constitutes the lie. By this 
rule you will find that intelligent spirits are never 
guilty of the imputed wrong. And yet the points of 
view are so different between the giver and receiver of 
instruction, that occasional misconstructions are not 
only probable, but sometimes inevitable. 

****** 

"Always try the testimony of spirits as you would 
any other testimony, by itself. Never surrender your 
reason, your freedom, your individuality, to any spirit 
in the body or out. These are your own, and there is 
no power, finite or infinite, that has any right to 
infringe them. 

"There may be a few exceptions to this in some 
very peculiar cases and periods of development. But 
in the main the rule holds good; and if it were 
adhered to, there would be fewer silly and ridicu- 
lous things done in the name of spirits than are now 
witnessed." 

There is much truth in this vision of our gifted 
author. The fault may be often our own, more than 
the spirit's. Our blundering confuses their manifesta- 
tion. Looking through our soiled glasses — mental- 
ity — daubed with ignorance and filthy habits, how can 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 205 

spirits then appear to us in their beautiful aspects? 
Put the glasses in order, and see how the great light 
will come in. 

Our physical condition, from transmitted and edu- 
cated habits, deflecting to the spiritual relationally, 
develops a corresponding grade of manifestations, the 
most tangible of which is the materialization of a 
spiritual body. The process is doubtless analogous 
with natural gestation and birth— the sexual and every 
other organ of the body contributing its ethereal share, 
which, aggregated together, presents to the natural 
eye a visible creation— a spirit in persona identically 
revealed. If, then, these magnetically procreative 
organs are perverted or befouled in unnatural rela- 
tions, and so functionally diseased— thus projecting 
clouded and poisoning exhalations upon the brain and 
thence affecting the mind— the manifest spiritual 
body to the observer will be in texture and appear- 
ance a dark veil of that spirit, while the spirit itself 
may be clear and bright as the celestial morning in 
heaven. As to the good part thus revealed we must 
be our own judges, dating from the life we live, and 
careful analysis of the instructions which such spirits 
impart. 

So far as we now know, it is safe to conclude, if 
the presence of a spirit, whether materialized or not, 
leaves us in moral abandon and gloom, by exchange 
of spheres, that such spirit is in a starved condition, 
and needs our help. Says Jung Stilling: "When a 
departed spirit is tranquil in its mind, its touch is felt 



206 THE GADAKENE. 

to be like the softness of a cool air — exactly as when 
the electric fluid is poured upon any particular part of 
the body. The spirit's body is therefore entirely in 
the power of the mind, and it forms itself inwardly 
and outwardly according to the imagination and the 
inward propensities." 

Over brain work in earth life, passional excess, 
nervous excitements and shocks, unbalanced sympa- 
thies, habitual jealousies, mismated relations, are 
among the causes of depletion, ever warping and 
injuring the gestative process of spiritual embodi- 
ment. A spirit so reduced must be in a most deplora- 
ble condition, being obliged to procure help medium- 
istically, preying upon a medium with a ravenous 
thirst and educing the madness we often observe when 
so controlled. It is no longer a wonder why certain 
media have been tempted! A reliable friend of ours, 
who was present as witness, states that a poor, fam- 
ished spirit, mad and furious, made various attempts 
to procure relief in a circle. Prayer, singing, advis- 



ing, 



.->i 



eating, and other expedients were tried, but 
failed. At length the spirit said, through the medium, 
" Pile up your hands alternately one upon the other." 
They did so, and the spirit sipped from that new vol- 
taic battery and obtained strength, and afterwards by 
other aids progressed into beautiful balance. 

In one of our (Sen. Editor's) visions, we saw a ban- 
quet in the spirit world. Scores of spirits were seated 
around a table loaded with a rich variety of food and 
drink; all enjoying the feast with great hilarity, ainid 



HOPE FOK THE BEWILDERED. 207 

joke and vivacity, thus generating a healthful and 
gestative atmosphere. At one end of the table sat a 
famished woman, who for years had tried in the spirit 
world to get relief, and at last, by the kind offices of 
the friends we saw, gradually recuperated by this 
magnetic imbibation. Waking from the vision, the 
conviction was strong upon our mind, that such meth- 
ods of cure are also practical in earth life. Spirits 
returning see that we need fun and frolic; they induce 
all manner of healthful amusement; they inspire 
departure from dead customs and habits. Let us not 
interpret their electric activities as unworthy of such 
guardianship. 

Years agone, more especially when the priesthood 
held sway over the minds of the masses, and science 
was circumscribed to the inspection of the few, it was 
an easy matter for the clergy, by means of the cross 
or bible or prayers to exorcise an obsessing or unhappy 
spirit, — that was troubled perhaps as to where lay its 
earthly bones, — or produce a timely suspension of dis- 
turbances, because all this corresponded with the 
superstitious educations of such spirits who believed 
the clergy were God-appointed, and their rites were 
sacred; but, of course, such interference wrought no 
real change or improvement, no more than a vicious 
child is reformed when its whims are indulged by an 
unwise parent. These days the clerical office no longer 
hides human weaknesses and follies, and those serving 
here are generally shorn of every power to compete 
with spirit agency, because of their pampered preju- 



208 THE GADARENE. 

dices and habitually spiritual imbecility, not being 
informed nor willing to inform themselves. Spirits 
know this in our nineteenth century, and are learn- 
ing by experiences most trying that there are no 
proxy methods by which to eradicate their troubles, 
no ecclesiastic, royal road to heaven, no priest or 
church, or sacred book, or holy shrine, that has power 
to compensate for the derelictions of the earth-life. 

A palliating truth is to be considered. A large per- 
centage of mental suffering, irrespective of worlds, is 
conventional and abnormal. A superstitious or sec- 
tarian spirit, pure in heart, may therefore appear 
unhappy, but the moment, as by a flash of light, this 
psychic influence fades away, its mind is illuminated 
with angelic joy. Wherever the central affections 
were good, it is thus easy for the external character 
to right itself. So, much of the darkness cast upon 
ns from the spirit side is mere appearance. This 
fact in spirit science is illustrated in the law of identi- 
fication. The experiences of spirits are like our own 
in the chemistries of life. Conditionally we can return 
to other days. Imagination at play, we relive the joys 
or sorrows of the past. By the law of materialization, 
emotions generate their corresponding spheres, and 
these by an innate instinct organically shape them- 
selves, analogous with a crystalizing process, to appear 
to the medium what that spirit once was in earth-life — 
appear just as the feeling is at the time of emotional 
retrospection. 

Professor E. Whipple truly says: "People, by the 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 209 

corrupting nature of education and impression are so 
apt to associate their dear ones out of the material 
form with the wo-begone condition of matters here, 
that it renders it very difficult for them to overcome 
the advantage that these impressions give to a false 
class of spirits (not unfortunate) against any attempt 
that they may make to reach us. When it shall be 
accepted that ours is an imposed-upon condition of 
being — that everybody is more or less unnatural, by 
constraint and misdirection, having their origin in the 
unseen — the scale will turn in favor of those who love 
us. For the difficulty now is in man's ignorance of the 
real condition of things. For man is conscious of 
being unnatural without directly suspecting the cause, 
which cannot be a result from himself; for whatever 
that should be, would be natural. Hence our condi- 
tion here, under the circumstances, may not be inaptly 
compared to a steel bow, the opposite ends of which 
are drawn toward each other by a strong cord. This 
sundered, the bow assumes its natural condition. So, 
at death, the soul — out of its natural, lovable ele- 
ment here, by the network of constraint thrown about 
it and the direct oppression of subtle spirits — when 
released from these oppressions, is at once itself. Man, 
go into your own independent soul, and spirits can 
find you as easy as bees can find flowers." 

Let us beware how we throw the coverlid of our 
drowsiness over the spirit watchers of our voluptuous 
slumbers; lest we 
18 



210 THE GADAKENE. 

" Check and chide 
The serial angels, as they float about us 
With robes of a so-called wisdom, till they grow 
The same tame slaves to custom and the world." 

The return of a spirit quickens into life the unbal- 
anced remains of old habits; and by such activity that 
spirit may afterwards make a new progress, when the 
mediumistic agency is orderly in truth and goodness. 
It is the same as it is in magnetic healing. The stir- 
ring of the deadening disease by a healthful manipu- 
lation till the patient for the time feels worse, is a sign 
of constitutional vitality — that nature is thus trying to 
restore itself. 

Judge Edmonds relates a case like this: " I knew 
a man — a noble man by nature — a graduate, a soldier 
in the revolution, a general in the army of 1812 — who 
imbibed a love for liquor. It was the fashion then. 
The habit grew upon him. He finally died of ' deli- 
rium tremens.' This army general had a son highly 
mediumistic, whom the parent influenced more or less. 
Thus returning to the more material plane with its 
lingering memories and tendencies to previous habits, 
he influenced the son to imbibe the poisoned draught. 
The habit was growing; the son was conscious of it 
and tried to stop; he prayed for help; and yet, with 
a prayer on his lips, he would pour down the gin. He 
would resolve to go by a liquor-house, and yet, moved 
by a mighty impulse, would go straight into it. He 
said to himself, '/ cannot stopP He was almost in 
despair. Finally, with a determined struggle — and 
divine reliance upon God and angels for help — he 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 211 

broke the spell. The appetite — the desire — was gone 
in a moment, and has not returned for years. This 
general has been in the spirit-world thirty years. This 
son, by his will-power and victory, accomplished a 
double result — saving himself and parent in the 
spirit-world. A further result was the uniting con- 
jngially of those whom habit had separated, into 
perfect relationship of love and harmony." 

SPIRITS OBSESSED BY THEIR MEDIA ! 

As the spirit of a man interblends with his body, 
the forces of each correlated, so are spirits and the 
influences of their world united with mortals and 
their world of interests. Often is a spirit, magneti- 
cally inhabiting the body and mind of its medium, 
affectionally represented in every part by the copart- 
nership of spheres, till the emotions of one transmits 
its force to the other, like two responsive, musical 
chords. As spirits are just as dependent upon mor- 
tals for support as mortals upon spirits, the latter can 
be as readily reached by the former as vice versa. 
For aught we know, the effect of spirit-intercourse 
with those of earth-life that are positive to them, may 
cast a dark shadow there. They often aver that a 
descent into certain atmospheres here is more painful 
and repellant than death; but they cheerfully do it 
from sympathy for our benighted conditions; and in 
our joy thus awakened they at last find their heaven. 
It is like a philanthropist entering the haunts of 
moral pestilence wdiere he must suffer to rescue the 



212 THE GADAKENE. 

lost. Spirits often have to insulate themselves by 
great force of will against the malaria of these mag- 
netisms; but the peril is only superficial to such as 
are principled in loves of truth and goodness. Where 
a spirit is not thus interiorly illuminated, and is 
attracted back to earth-life, even with the good motive 
of blessing suffering mortals, if negative — as such a 
condition evolves — it is liable to obsession from the 
unbalanced media with which it may affiliate; and 
who can reasonably deny that such are tortured, that 
multitudes of such are terribly crucified? It makes 
no difference whether a spirit is an inhabitant of the 
physical or spirit-world; the effects of starvation are 
the same, educing a ravenous appetite of the inner 
affections. So tyrants prey upon inharmonious spirits, 
obsessing them to do their bidding and serve their 
insatiable purposes to gain power. Let us be careful 
how we charge spirits of any grade with criminality, 
lest sin may lie at the very door of our own hearts ! 
Luther Colby related to us a case of a spirit, called 
by a medium to perform the "physical manifesta- 
tions," with a high and noble object; but when the 
league was formed between them, and the spirit by 
the force of the medium's magnetism was compelled 
to follow him and participate associative! y with all 
his debaucheries, the spirit seriously protested against 
such demoralization, accusing him of enclosing its 
mental sphere with a dark, mephitic effluvia. The 
history of disorderly mediumship from the spirit-side 
remains yet to be written, when we may have poor 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 213 

reasons for charging the heavens with uncleanness, 
as we inspect the sad effect of our social perversities 
upon the angel- world. How extensive and solemn, 
then, are our responsibilities! If our lives are right, 
so are spirits also blessed. If we hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, however ignorant or unfortunate 
we may be, it is a prayer that the holy spirits answer 
in beneficence. And when we are thus made strong 
we should be willing to bless other spirits of a lower 
grade, whether in or out of the earthly tabernacle. To 
enlighten and save is the object of exchange between 
the two worlds. ) It is often a great burden to take on 
the dark spheres of unhappy spirits; but this relieves 
them, if we are faithful, just the same as in the heal- 
ing art by laying on of hands, when the healer receives 
the diseased sphere and scatters it, and gives one of 
magnetic health in exchange; as was said of the Naz- 
arene — " Himself took our diseases and bear our sick- 



nesses. 



* ■* 



"With his stripes we are healed." The 
prerequisite, then, to success with an unregenerate 
spirit, is a fearless moral courage on our part — sound 
physical health — a positive will — a forgiving and 
loving disposition. In short, we ourselves must be 
regenerated from all groveling desires. Then, in 
casting out, shall we be able to save both medium 
and spirit, and so prevent an obsession in another 
quarter. 

THE SHAKERS. 

The Shakers, though abstemious in all their ways, 
living the most self-denying life, after the pattern of 



214 THE GADARENE. 

the Essenians, passed through the same ordeal prepar- 
atory to higher influx from angels. Elder F. W. 
Evans, writing us says: " That Spiritualism began and 
went out from this order, you are well aware, I sup- 
pose. During the seven years from about 1842 to 
1849, we did certainly have some experience in ' obses- 
sion,' and every other form and phase of inter-mundane 
and super-spiritual communication." 

This revered brother and lecturer, contrasting an 
incongruous Spiritualism with celibate life, speaks thus 
of the remedy for the usual glutted and obsessional 
habits of society as it now is: " It is my present the- 
ology that in unfallen worlds, Shaker (or resurrection) 
organizations exist in numbers equal to the populative 
emergency (as wheat in the farmers' granaries reserved 
for other uses than seed); there being in them none 
of the destructive agencies which hold population in 
check on this globe, such as perverted nutrition and 
generation — 'eating and drinking, marrying and giv- 
ing in marriage,' not for use, but lust; engendering all 
forms of evil; physical diseases, wars, and fightings — 
murder of adults, and ' murder of the innocents ' in all 
stages of embryonic existence — 'the social evil ' (now 
so hellishly popular); slavery, poverty, famines, mo- 
nopoly, usury, aristocracy, doctors^ lawyers, priests 
and mediums, 'living upon the sins of God's people;' 
the doctors administering poisons to keep patients 
sick; ' the priests preaching for hire, and the mediums 
divining for money.' " 



HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 215 

A JUST CHARITY. 

Our pity, rather than onr condemnation, should go 
out to those who are obsessed, when they perform acts 
that cause us to blush. Our pliarisaical criticism will 
only augment the difficulty. When we understand 
the causes, and are able to meet them with saving 
influences to all concerned, then are we qualified to 
judge as to merit or demerit of character. It is a 
well-known law in psychologizing, that the subject 
tastes, feels, thinks, and acts as the operator does; and 
that when the operator, during the magnetic sleep, 
commands the subject to do a certain thing, that sub- 
ject, when awake, feels that the act must be performed. 
That command may be given in silence, but it will, of 
course, be just as imperative. 

How, easy, then, for a mischievous spirit to educe 
strange manifestations of character in its unwary 
medium, which would be scorned in a normal condition 
of mind. But this does not remove the personal 
responsibility of the medium. Even in the uncon- 
scious trance the soul is most wakeful; it is ever the 
god of the body, holding itself absolutely responsible 
for all the deeds done by or in the body, keeping record 
of all, whether automatic or volitionary. And how 
elevating if the psychic control to which the soul con- 
sents be morally wise; how ennobling if thus the soul 
regenerates the communicating spirit, seeking light in 
medium ship — if thereby both are made wiser and 
better. 



216 THE GADARENE. 

REGENERATION IN SPIRIT LIFE. 

Robert Dale Owen, in his " Debatable Land," hap- 
pily says: "There is repentance there as here. There 
is restless regret and sorrow for grave sins committed 
while here. There is anxious desire for pardon from 
those whom the spirit wronged during earth life. In 
other w T ords, the natural effects of evil doing follow us 
to our next phase of life; and in that phase of life, as 
in the present, we amend, and attain to better things 
by virtue of repentance. 

" In this the mode of moral progression after death 
is similar, which alone avails on earth. 'Repent!' 
was Christ's first public exhortation. To the ' spirits 
in prison ' on the other side — spirits not yet released 
from earthly bondage and earthly remorse — the same 
exhortation, it would seem, is appropriate still." 

Samuel Benjamin Walthers, A. D. 1730, narrates in 
his interesting work entitled " Monthly Discourses on 
the "World of Spirits," that about 1715, Christian, 
Duke of Saxe Eisenberg, was reposing upon his couch 
at noon, when some one knocked at the door, and, as 
was his custom, he answered, "Come in! " on which 
a female figure representing Anna, daughter of one of 
the Electors of Saxony, entered, attired in an ancient 
princely robe. The spirit identified herself as the wife 
John Casimer, Duke of Saxe Coburg, and that they 
both had been in the spirit world above a hundred 
years. She then informed Christian that in the earth- 
life her husband was jealous of her on account of her 



HOPE FOR TIIE BEWILDERED. 217 

frequent conversation with a cavalier in private upon 
religious matters. Although she established her inno- 
cence, he was unrelenting. She entreated reconciliation 
on her death bed, but he was stubborn and hateful. 
She was in a state of blessedness, but not at full rest 
because of her husband. lie confessed his guilt in 
prayer, but, not being yet reconciled, continued all this 
while in " cold and darkness." Having stated these 
facts, the spirit then said it was in the power of 
Christian to reconcile them. After repeated evidence 
of the good intent of the spirit, through other visita- 
tions bearing upon the request, and committing 
himself to long meditation and prayer, he consented 
to act as mediator according to the heavenly order. 
A night was set — not day, for she averred her hus- 
band, because of his spiritual condition, could not 
appear in the light. They both came. He heard their 
full statement, he being appointed umpire. He decided 
in her favor. Then joined their hands and pronounced 
a blessing in the name of God. They all three sung 
a hymn, after which they vanished out of sight, 
rejoicing together at the reconciliation. 

At the twenty-third Anniversary of the advent of 
Modern Spiritualism, held in Boston, March 31st, 
Lizzie Doten delivered one of her soul-breathing poems, 
founded upon this incident related by Richter, the 
German writer: 

"The hero of the tale forsook his wife — a patient, 
loving woman whom he had most cruelly misunder- 
stood. After years of absence he returned to his home 
19 



218 THE GADAEENE. 

and upon inquiring for her he was directed to her 
grave. He visited it in the clear moonlight of a 
summer's night; and as he stood beside it he felt that 
his repentance had come too late. Turning sorrowfully 
away he retraced his steps to the inn. On re-entering 
it he found there a wandering minstrel — a woman — 
who sang a sad song, accompanying herself with the 
music of a harp; and the burden of her song was: 
' Gone is gone, and dead is dead ! ' The utter hope- 
lessness of these words filled his soul with anguish. 
'Oh,' he exclaimed, 'thou loved one! patient and 
long-suffering, would that I could call thee back again, 
not to forgive me — oh no! — but rather that I might 
have the consolation of suffering for thy sake, and of 
showing thee by my repentance how differently I 
would conduct toward thee now! " 

Such is the natural feeling and plea of the soul when 
conscious of its unkind suspicion and treatment of a 
loved one. If not here, it must there awaken to pain 
of repentance that would fain return the slighted hours 
and the beloved friend. How differently then would 
we behave! how true our love! But can it be? Can 
we ever outgrow the regrets of such recollections? 
We ask the serious question in tears, looking up to the 
great angels for an answer. Is there a Lethean stream ? 
Is there a forgiveness that will make all earth's clouds 
great mountains of gold whereon our souls can be 
transfigured into the glory of virtue? Ask of Love, 
come to its heart, perform good deeds to the living, 






HOPE FOR THE BEWILDERED. 219 

and then is not the poem from our risen sister, Achsa 
"VV. Sprague, realized? 

" Evermore Love's quickening breath 

Calls the living soul from death ; 

And the resurrection's power 

Comes to every dying hour. 

When the soul, with vision clear, 

Learns that heaven is always near, 

Never more shall it be said, 
• Gone is gone, and dead is dead ! ' " 

It is something to think of, those whom we have 
blest are our loving guardians, and whom we have 
wronged are just as near, kindling the fire within to 
consume the guilt, resting not until justice is done by 
reconciliation. The trespass against the divine of 
human nature ties the injured to us as accusing spirits. 
Strike the steel and it is polarized. Even a suspicion 
unconfessed and unreconciled may mar the serenity of 
the parties for long, suffering years The tender 
angels grieve over the least stain, and rest not until it 
is obliterated. 

SPIRITUAL VESTURES. 

When in order of life and habit, a spirit, in or out 
of the earthly body, is re-clothing itself with purer 
and finer elements, progressively, as Anna Blackwell 
says: "While a spirit remains ignorant and impure, 
its pc'risprit [the permanent fluidic body which is the 
inseparable envelope of spirit, or spiritual body,] com- 
posed of fluidic particles corresponding to its state, and 



220 THE GADARENE. 

magnetically attracted by that state, is almost as dense 
and gross as a material body;' but as it progresses in 
knowledge and purity it attracts to its^H's^^fluidie 
particles of a progressively finer and more ethereal 
order, and the more etherealized pe'risprit, in its turn, 
material elements of a higher and less heavy quality; 
the material bodies become gradually more and more 
fluidic, until they attain to states of ethereality so 
refined as practically to release it from the limitations 
of space and time." 

The comparative darkness attending certain spirits 
for a long period in the land of souls, is only the reflex 
action of their own spiritual states. They generate 
the mist that dims their vision. The malicious and 
depraved of this, carrying their hells with them, enter 
the hells or lower spheres of the spirit-life. Their 
affections centered upon earth and earthly things, by 
an inexorable law of their being they are mentally and 
psychologically imprisoned for a time near the surface 
of this planet. As fish to water, bird to air, so the 
earthly minded to the grosser strata and aural circles 
belting the earth, till through aspiration, unfoldment, 
and refinement, they become prepared to traverse the 
starry spaces of the higher heavens. 

The New Testament scriptures inform us that Jesus, 
after being put to " death in the flesh, but quickened 
by the spirit, preached to the spirits in prison." 
Peter further speaks of the " gospel being preached to 
them that are dead.'' The fact of such preaching 
implies a moral benefit derived therefrom. 



CHAPTEE XII. 

REGISTRY OF LIFE. 

The author of Euthanasy has finely said: " In my 
character there are the effects of Paul's journey to 
Damascus, and the meeting of King John and the 
Barons at Runneymede. There is in my soul the 
seriousness of the many conflicts, famines and sorrows 
of early English times. And of my enthusiasm, 
some of the warmth is from fiery words that thrilled 
my forefathers in the days of the reformation." 

Jean Reynaud well says, " Each one of us carries in 
his actual form and organism the secret history of his 
anterior emotions; so accurately, that spiritual eyes, 
penetrating to the depths of our being, see at a glance 
all that Ave have been in all that we are." 

" The stars in their courses sing! " Verily, for they 
impinge against resisting media as they revolve and 
sweep through the awful void. Being of different 
sizes, texture, tension, and revolution, the sounds are 
myriad, commingling into the eternal symphony that 
enchants the homes of the immortals. 

And who shall confront our ancient brethren, who 

averred that the stars rule us; that here is demarked 

our destiny? The soil we tread upon affects us; the 

trees over our heads engrave their very foliage on our 

(221) 



222 



THE GAD A RENE. 



brains; the kisses of the grassy tips thrill us through 
from palms of feet to dome of thought; the beauty 
of flowers enchants us, and their fragrances soften our 
natures; the old gray rocks, as we lay our heads there, 
gird us to strength; the winds remove our fevers; the 
sunbeams bloom us in soul as they do all the land- 
scapes; the snows whiten our ideas as they do our 
locks. Where is the boundary to this elemental rela- 
tionship and susceptibility to inspiration? If a slight 
wave of water or zephyr moves us so, how much more 
must a great world in space, concentrating in us its 
mighty battery of life! Think not that these nightly 
stars, that seem twinkling in a cerulean arch, are 
meant only for guidance in the dark or poesy's flame 
of aspiration. As they mirror themselves, cold and 
weird, in the focus of our souls, they distill there the 
very nature of all their qualities, and affiliate us for- 
ever so with the intelligent beings peopling their seas 
and island continents, whom we shall yet greet as we 
veer upward unfolding into their immortal beatitudes. 

What a sublime truth bursts upon us here! Our 
relations with the universe are such, that, by this reg- 
istry, we live all the past in the present. The (French) 
author of " Lumen " has philosophically elaborated 
this fact; and prior to this the author of "The Earth 
and Stars" presents the same chain of reasoning: 

"The universe encloses the pictures of the past, 
like an indestructible and incorruptible record con- 
taining the purest and clearest truth. * * As thun- 
der and lightning are in reality simultaneous, but in 



REGISTRY OF LIFE. 223 

the storm the distant thunder follows at the interval 
of some minutes after the flash; so, in like manner, 
according to our ideas, the pictures of every occur- 
rence propagate themselves into the distant ether, 
upon the wings of the ray of light; and, although 
they become weaker and smaller, yet, in immeasurable 
distance, they still have color and form; and as every 
thing possessing color and form is visible, so mnst 
these pictures also be said to be visible, however 
impossible it may be for the human eye to perceive 
them with the hitherto discovered optical apparatus. 
Thus that record which spreads itself out further and 
further in the universe, by the vibration of the light, 
really and actually exists and is visible, but to eyes 
more powerful than those of man." 

The same author makes an astronomical calculation 
by which a spiritual intelligence might actually see 
enacted all the events of the past. He starts from the 
basis of the velocity of light that travels — as discov- 
ered by eclipses — at the rate of two hundred and 
thirty-seven thousand miles in a second. Having 
ascertained the distances of the planets and fixed 
stars, he shows that a star of the first magnitude will 
send its light to our earth in from three to twelve years; 
of the second magnitude, in twenty years; of the 
third, in thirty years; of the fourth, in forty -five 
years; of the fifth, in sixty-six years; of the sixth, in 
ninety-six years; of the seventh, in one hundred and 
eighty years. On the calculation of Striive, who 
maintains that a star of the twelfth magnitude is 



224 THE GADAEENE. 

twenty-three thousand billions of miles off, our author 
shows it will take a ray of light from such a star four 
thousand years to reach our earth. According to 
this, the light of a star of the twelfth magnitude — 
only perceptible by a very good telescope — " has, at 
the time it meets our eye, already left its star four 
thousand years, and since that time has wandered on 
its own course, unconnected with its origin." It is 
plain that a ray of light meeting our eye is not sent 
forth from the star at the same moment; consequently, 
we do not see the star as it now is, but as it was when 
its ray was emitted. Finding the time it takes for 
light to pass from different worlds to our earth, this 
author enables a spiritual observer, traveling with the 
velocity of light itself, to witness and experience all 
the events of the past that have occurred in human 
history. If that observer were standing on the moon, 
observing the light of our planet, he would not see it 
as it is, but as it was five quarters of a second ago ; if 
standing on the sun he would see our planet as it was 
eight minutes ago; on Jupiter, as it was fifty-two 
minutes ago; on Uranus, two hours ago; on Yega 
in Centaur, twelve years ago ; on a star of the twelfth 
magnitude, four thousand years ago, when Memphis 
in Egypt was founded. " In the immeasurably great 
number of fixed stars which are scattered about in 
the universe, floating in ether at a distance of between 
fifteen to twenty billions of miles from us, reckoning 
backward any given number of years, doubtless a star 
could be found which sees the past epochs of our earth 



REGISTRY OF LIFE. 225 

as if existing now, or so nearly corresponding to the 
time, that the observer need wait no long time to see 
its condition at the required moment. * * * It is 
not in contradiction with the laws of thought, that 
a man may travel to a star in a given time; and he 
may eifect this, provided with so powerful a telescope 
as to be able to overcome every given distance, and 
every light and shadow in the object to be examined. 
* * With the aid of a knowledge of the position 
and distance of every given fixed star (to be attained 
by the study of astronomy), it will be possible to recall 
sensibly to our very eyes an actual and true represent- 
ation of every moment of history that has passed. If, 
for instance, we wish to see Luther before the council 
at "Worms, we must transport ourselves in a second to 
any fixed star, from which the light requires about 
three hundred years (or so much more or less) in order 
to reach the earth. Thence the earth will appear in 
the same state, and with the same persons moving 
upon it as it actually was at the time of the Reforma- 
tion. * * * Let us imagine an observer, with 
infinite powers of vision, in a star of the twelfth mag- 
nitude. He would see the earth at this moment as it 
existed at the time of Abraham. Let us, moreover, 
imagine him moved forwards in the direction of our 
earth, with such speed, that in a short time (say in an 
hour) he comes to within a distance of a hundred 
millions of miles, being then as near to us as the sun 
is whence the earth is seen as it was eight minutes 
before; then before the eye of this observer the entire 



226 THE GADAEENE. 

history of the world, from the time of Abraham to the 
present day, passes by in the space of an hour. * * * 
If we divide this hour into four thousand parts, so 
that about a second corresponds to each, he has seen 
the events of a whole year in a single second. They 
have passed before him with all the particulars, all the 
motions and positions of the persons occupied with 
the entire changing scenery, and he has lived through 
them all — every thing entire and nnshortened, but 
only in the quickest succession — and one hour was 
for him crowded with quite as many events as the 
space of four thousand years upon the earth. If we 
give the observer power also to halt at pleasure in his 
path, as he is flying through the ether, he will be able 
to represent to himself, as rapidly as he pleases, that 
moment in the world's history which he wishes to 
observe at leisure; provided he remains at a distance 
when this moment of history appears to have just 
arrived, allowing for the time which the light con- 
sumes in traveling to the position of the observer." 

Though some of these conclusions are based upon a 
supposed date, they are real prophesies of what will 
be in the beautiful hereafter. Accepting the deductive 
law as truthful, that other worlds than ours are peopled 
with progressive intelligencies, they must in time 
discover methods by which to communicate and observe 
the daily and hourly transactions of each star and 
planet with the facility that we now telegraph across 
the ocean, and so read, as already described, the histo- 



REGISTRY OF LIFE. 227 

ries of the indelible past. What a stupendous thought, 
and how solemn its moral import! 

But we are not left to the tardy researches of mate- 
rialistic scientists in the discovery of these truths. As 
with all other developments, mediumistic intuitions, 
under the sweet guidance of the risen seers, have laid 
bare in the light the registry of life. By the delicate 
touch of magnetic spheres, of mind with matter, 
of sentient intelligence with unsentient motion of 
elements, crystallized or gaseous, we can read the psy- 
chological hieroglyphics of eternal events, and hear 
again the voices of the past in the dim sepulchres of 
the so-called dead. Seizing upon the magnetic threads 
that time is only weaving, that stretch from the object 
once touched with the immortal genius who, ages gone, 
stamped the imagery thereon, we can trace on and up 
to the mind-world of causation, whence may come to 
us correct statements of what was done under the sun. 

Not long since an English company, under the cor- 
porate seal of the British government, sent out an 
expedition of discovery to the classic lands. After 
several years of toil and search they found the ancient 
site of the Temple of Diana, of Ephesus, under an 
alluvial deposit of twenty-two feet. They exhumed 
those marble columns and transferred them to the 
British Museum. Says a correspondent of the London 
Times: "The largest, weighing upward of eleven 
tons, is part of a drum of one of the ccslatm columnm 
mentioned by Pliny — i. e. columns with figures sculp- 
tured on them, of which the temple has thirty-six. 



228 THE GADARENE. 

Of tins bold, striking innovation of Greek architecture 
there exists, it is believed, no other example except at 
Ephesus. The relief of this drum appears to represent 
an assemblage of deities, of whom the only one who 
can be positively identified is Mercury, the rest being 
draped female figures. On a stone from a pilaster, 
corresponding in dimensions to the sculptured drum, 
is a relief representing Hercules struggling with a 
draped female figure; and on another fragment of a 
drum are the lower halves of some seated and standing 
female figures. This sculpture is very bold and effect- 
ive as a decoration, but wants the ineffable charm and 
freshness of the frieze of the Parthenon, while in mas- 
terly vigor of execution and dramatic force, it falls 
short of the frieze of the Mausoleum. It is careless and 
inexact in execution, and has the characteristics which 
we might expect to find in the Greek sculpture of the 
Macedonian period, when work was executed rapidly 
to gratify the vanity of kings, and when an Oriental 
love for mere mass rather than beauty of design had 
begun to affect both sculpture and architecture. Allow- 
ing for this first disappointment, I own that I gazed 
with a peculiar interest on these relics of those famous 
columns on which St. Paul must have gazed when he 
preached against them, but which local fanaticism, 
aided by local vested interests, preserved in all their 
splendor for three centuries after his coming." 

What does that British Museum now contain? Sim- 
ply those grand old columns, those pilasters, those dim 
and colossal images, resurrected as from the dead at 



EEGISTKT OF LIFE. 229 

the trumpet call of science? On those carved relics, 
living in their very fibres, and living there were they 
crumbled to dust, are the psychological imagery of the 
classic feasts, gladiatorial sports, moving columns of 
military victors, the faces of sceptered kings and 
emperors, the voices of orators, the song of musicians 
commemorating the national battles, the bloody sacri- 
fices of priests, the groans of the prisoner, the shrieks 
of the insane, the love and beauty of women, the jeal- 
ousy and fierceness of sensuous tyrants, the prattle of 
childhood, the mystic rustle and alarming minstrelsy 
of the spiritual oracles that shaped the civilizations 
and religions of those ages, now reviving in fresher 
effulgence. All these are there, to be read, and heard, 
and revoiced by the seers of the Nineteenth century. 

And so are we to-day writing our history for all 
time, to be read by us and generations coming. Every 
tread of our feet upon the ground leaves its magnetic 
imprint; every motion of our hand burns forever in 
the eternal light of its history; every heart pulse 
musicalizes itself in the great beating soul of the 
universe; every look of the eye stamps itself on the 
earth and bending sky; every thought that trembles 
in its convoluting brain is trembling still through all 
the heavens of inspecting angels. 

" The air," says Professor Babbage, " is one vast 
library, on whose pages are forever written all that 
man has ever said or woman whispered." 

We find in a recent number of the London Times 
a story for mothers, and as it contains a beautiful 






230 THE GADAEENE. 

answer to some letters we have received, we give it 
entire: " On a December night, after the little brood 
were all abed, a mother sat thinking over what she had 
accomplished in the last year. To her it seemed to 
have been one of fruitless effort, broken and disjointed. 
She had done nothing but keep the house and family, 
and even this seemed to have been but indifferently 
clone. Yearnings she had for something better, to be 
conscious of some unity of purpose, some weaving 
together of the life-threads so broken and single, some 
comfortable assurance of what was duty. That night 
in her dreams she was traversing a vast plain, where 
no trees were visible save those that skirted the distant 
horizon, with a wreath of golden clouds resting upon 
their tops. Before her, traveling toward that distant 
light, was a female with little children about her, 
sometimes in her arms, sometimes at her side; and as 
she journeyed on she busied herself caring for them. 
Now she soothed them when weary, now she taught 
them how to travel, and now she warned them of the 
pitfalls and stumbling blocks in the way. She talked 
to them of that golden light which she kept constantly 
in view, and toward which she seemed hastening with 
her little flock. But what was most remarkable, all 
unknown to her, on two golden clouds floating above 
her reposed two angels. Before each was a golden 
book and a pen of gold. One angel, with mild and 
loving eyes, peered constantly over the right shoulder, 
and the other over the left. They followed her from 
the rising to the setting of the sun; they watched 



REGISTRY OF LIFE. 231 

every word, and look, and deed, no matter how trivial. 
"When it was good the angel over the right shoulder, 
with a glad smile, wrote it down in his golden book; 
when evil, however slight, the angel over the left 
shoulder wrote it down in his book. He kept his sor- 
rowful eyes upon her until he found penitence for the 
evil; then he dropped a tear upon his record and 
blotted it out, and both angels rejoiced. To the look- 
ers-on it seemed that the traveler did little worthy of 
such careful record. Sometimes she did but bathe the 
weary feet of her children, yet that was recorded in 
the golden book; sometimes she did but wait patiently 
to lure back some little truant who had taken a step 
in the wrong direction, and that, too, was set down by 
the angel over the right. Sometimes, with her eyes 
fixed upon the golden horizon, she became so intent 
on her own progress as to let the little pilgrims at her 
side languish or stray; then the angel over the left 
shoulder wrote it down in his book, but followed her 
with sorrowing eyes seeking to blot it out; if, wishing 
to hasten on her journey, she left the little ones 
behind, that, too, the sorrowing angel recorded. The 
sympathies of the dreamer were warmly excited for 
the traveler, and with a beating heart she quickened 
her steps that she might overtake her, tell her what 
she had seen, entreat her to be watchful, faithful, and 
patient to the end of her life's work, for she had her- 
self seen that its results would all be known when 
these golden books should be unclasped. Eager to 
warn her of this, she gently touched her. The traveler 



232 THE GADARENE. 

turned, and she recognized, or seemed to recognize, 
herself." 

It may or may not be that angels keep a record like 
this; but it is certain that every impulse of life and 
deed is ineffaceably written on our immortal being to 
be inspected by and by. 

Pressure upon the brain stops mental action. When 
it is removed, the last idea finding expression when 
the blow is received, will be uttered, even if months 
and years intervene. 

Thus the mind holds all its pictures and thought - 
pulses, even though its media is obstructed; and those 
most active at death are most fresh and vigorous on 
waking to consciousness on the " other side," making 
life but one continuous Now — death but the hyphen 
that connects the two worlds. Is it not of some 
moral moment, then, when we are ushered into the 
embodied presence of immortals and hail the first 
.dawn of celestial light, that our last hours be hallowed 
to holy communings? that our thoughts and words be 
as links of love holding close and strong in magnetic 
power with the "just made perfect? " that the mental 
aura our angels shall first sense with gratitude, and its 
voice sent back to identify us to earthly friends, trem- 
bling on our dying lips, shall correctly sign the plane 
of our life in the " beauty of holiness? " 



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